Patent ID: 8117194

Claim:
A method to be executed at least in part in a computing device for searching multilingual documents, the method comprising: on the computing device, receiving a search result set ranked in order of relevance in response to submitting a query based on a request from a user for documents, the submitted query including a list of languages from which the received search result set is filtered, the documents being indexed in a search engine index, each document in the search engine index including an identifier property and a language property, the identifier property identifying the document and the language property specifying a language version for the document, each document in the received search result set including an identifier property and a language property, the identifier property for each document in the received search result set identifying the document and the language property for each document in the received search result set specifying the language version for the document; determining which language version of each document in the received search result set is returned based on the list of languages included in the submitted query; processing the received search result set based on the determination; transforming the processed search result set into a relevance based ordered list; generating a final list based on the relevance based ordered list using localized and non-localized content of the documents, the generated final list including at least one localized document having a higher position in the generated final list than a non-localized document ranked higher in the order of relevance than the at least one localized document in the received search result set, the at least one localized document having a language property for a local language from the list of languages included in the submitted query, and the non-localized document having a language property for a non-local language from the list of languages included in the submitted query; and providing the generated final list to the user.