Search engine and method of indexing and searching of documents particularly on the world wide web giving faster updating of the index base

摘要

The search engine has an indexing module (22) with rapid access storage holding transient incremental data on a small number of documents, and storage (12,14,16; 32,34,36) for the index base which receives contents of the rapid access store. The indexing module forms and stores hash tables from received documents, and computes relevance weightings for elements extracted from documents.