Patent ID: 7730062

Claim:
A method for performing a text search, the method comprising: performing a case-sensitive search of a plurality of documents by determining a class of a capitalization characteristic of a search term and using the class to identify documents in a library that contain individual terms with corresponding capitalization characteristics of the class, the case-sensitive search comprising: receiving one or more search terms; making a determination of whether each character in each of the one or more search terms is capitalized; determining, based on the capitalization of each character in each of the one or more search terms, a capitalization characteristic class, of a set of two or more capitalization characteristic classes, for each of the one or more search terms; and identifying, from a plurality of documents, one or more documents based at least in part on the determination of the capitalization characteristic class for each of the one or more search terms, wherein a first capitalization characteristic class, of the set of two or more capitalization characteristic classes, is associated with search terms having all lower case letters, wherein a second capitalization characteristic class, of the set of two or more capitalization characteristic classes, is associated with search terms having all upper case letters, wherein identifying comprises, for a particular search term in the first capitalization characteristic class, identifying, from the plurality of documents, each document that comprises one or more of: (a) the particular search term in all upper case, (b) the particular search term in all lower case, and (b) the particular search term having at least one character in upper case and at least one character in lower case, and wherein identifying comprises, for a particular search term in the second capitalization characteristic class, identifying, from the plurality of documents, each document that comprises the particular search term in all upper case, wherein the set of two or more capitalization characteristic classes includes a third capitalization characteristic class, wherein the third capitalization characteristic class is associated with search terms having at least one character in upper case and at least one character in lower case, and wherein identifying comprises, for a particular search term in the third capitalization characteristic class, identifying, from the plurality of documents, each document that comprises the particular search term in either (a) all upper case letters or (b) having the same sequence of upper and lower case letters.