Patent ID: 7319994

Claim:
A method for accessing a compressed representation of a set of documents, comprising: storing the set of documents in a compressed representation; encoding a term within a document as a pointer to a next occurrence of the term in the documents, wherein the pointer is encoded as a byte difference between the encoded term and the next occurrence of the term in the set of documents; maintaining a sequential ordering between adjacent terms in the documents; receiving a search request containing terms to be searched for in the set of documents; converting the terms in the search request into corresponding term identifiers based on a term identifier table, wherein the term identifier table is a lookup structure that maps the textual form of a term to corresponding hash term identifiers; and identifying occurrences of the terms in the set of documents by: using the corresponding term identifiers for the terms in the search request to look up a term offset table for a pointer to a first occurrence of the terms in the compressed representation of the set of documents; and following a chain of pointers starting at the first occurrence to identify other occurrences of the terms in the compressed representation of the set of documents; and responding to the search request with identification of occurrences of the terms in the search request within the set of documents.