Patent Document ID: 8090722
Application ID: 11726275

Base Claim:
1. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having stored thereon computer-executable instructions that if executed by a computer cause the computer to perform a method, the method comprising: locating a document identifier in an index entry, where an index entry stores a value to match to a term in a query; determining whether the index entry includes an expansion identifier; upon determining that the index entry includes an expansion identifier, producing an expanded document by expanding a document associated with the document identifier with a document associated with the expansion identifier; determining a relevance value corresponding to the relevance of the expanded document to the query; and providing a signal corresponding to the relevance value.

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Claim 11:
11. The non-transitory computer-readable medium of claim 1 , where the method includes determining whether the index entry includes an expansion identifier that relates a first document to a second document as one or more of, an attaching document, an attached document, a referencing document, and a referenced document; where determining a relevance value corresponding to the relevance of the expanded document to the query includes calculating a term frequency for the term in the query, calculating an inverse document frequency for the document associated with the document identifier, and calculating an expansion inclusion frequency for the document associated with the expansion identifier, the expansion inclusion frequency being related to the frequency with which the document associated with the expansion identifier is used to expand a document, and upon determining that two or more query terms appear in the expanded document, computing a nearness value for the two or more terms, and upon determining that a first query term appears in a first document included in the expanded document and that a second query term appears in a second document included in the expanded document, updating the nearness value; and where providing a signal corresponding to the relevance value includes providing a signal that identifies a set of documents whose relevance to the query exceeds a threshold, where the set of documents may include documents identified by a document identifier in an index entry and may include documents identified by an expansion identifier in an index entry.