Patent ID: 7991771

Claim:
A computer program product embodied on a computer readable medium, the computer program product comprising computer instructions that implement the following operations: performing the following in response to a query comprising at least two terms, the query having a first portion comprising at least one term of the at least two terms and a second portion comprising at least one other term of the at least two terms: selecting a document from a plurality of documents; determining a score range of possible scores for the selected document by using a scoring function, where the score range comprises a lower bound and an upper bound, where the upper bounds and lower bounds are not equal, the determining the score range causing the scoring function to perform a partial evaluation, using only the first portion of the query, for the selected document in order to determine the score range, a score of the selected document residing within the score range and determinable using the first and second portion from the query; and determining, based at least on the score range, whether the selected document is relevant to the query, and if the selected document is relevant to the query, retaining the selected document as being relevant to the query, where the selected document is determined as relevant to the query in response to determining that the lower bound of the score range exceeds a threshold and the selected document is determined as not relevant to the query in response to determining that the upper bound of the score range does not exceeds the threshold.