| 摘要 |
<p>The present invention relates generally to a method and system for searching stored information on one or more computers and, more particularly, to a method and system for use in searching stored information on a networked system of computers, such as the Internet. The method comprises the steps of: generating a database of indexed information relating to said stored information, the database containing indexed terms and positional data representing the position of respective terms in respective documents; receiving, from a remote computer, a search query relating to the stored information; using a central computer to search the database of indexed information for at least one search term comprising the search query, and identifying documents in which said at least one search term occurs; using said positional data to generate a list of search results in accordance with the proximity of the at least one term from a beginning position of each respective document; and sending the list of search results to the remote computer. The proximity may be defined in accordance with the precise position of a term in a document, or with a particular segment of the document. The search results may be generated from a series of successive sweeps of the index, the first such sweep providing only the most pertinent documents. Additional relevance algorithms may be also be used, and an offset technique employed to set the beginning position of particular documents, to allow for documents which incorporate initial common portions. Additionally, the method involves suppression of duplicated documents found be a query submission, using a hash table containing hash values for index entries, and omitting from the results returned to the user all but one of the entries corresponding to a single hash value.</p> |
