Patent ID: 8370345

Claim:
A method for searching a collection of documents comprising: using at least one input text snippet and an index for the documents directed to both words and proximity of words; ranking the documents based on whether the documents include text that is similar to said at least one input text snippet, said ranking comprising: i) automatically generating multiple proximity queries for said at least one input text snippet comprising multiple combinations of words included in said at least one input text snippet; ii) submitting the generated proximity queries to each of the documents; and iii) collecting the documents resulting from the proximity queries; selecting a plurality of highest ranked documents to form a subset of documents; extracting snippets from each document in the subset of documents; creating a vector space model for a set defined by a union of the extracted snippets and said at least one input text snippet, the vector space model including vectors that represent a frequency measure of terms in the set; ranking the extracted snippets according to their respective vector distances from said at least one input text snippet; and ranking the documents within the subset of documents based on the number of the generated multiple proximity queries for each input text snippet that match each of the documents.