Patent ID: 7822752

Claim:
A system comprising: a ranking mechanism that ranks terms of a query based on one or more importance criteria into a set of ranked terms; and a merge mechanism that searches an index of terms, at least one term having a set of one or more document identifiers associated with a score and identifying a data structure that contains the at least one term, the merge mechanism configured to: search the index by choosing a topmost subset of the ranked terms based on a ranked importance of individual ranked terms; and search for documents in a subset of rows of the index, the subset of rows selected by having a relationship with at least one document identifier corresponding to a term of the topmost subset of the ranked terms, wherein the merge mechanism is configured to search for the documents by locating one or more particular documents within at least one row of the subset of rows by jumping within the at least one row to one or more jump points corresponding to associated document identifiers in the at least one row, wherein the jumping is based on a comparison of one or more document identifiers within the at least one row and a reference document identifier within another row corresponding to the topmost subset of the ranked terms; and at least one computing device configured to implement one or both of the ranking mechanism or the merge mechanism.