PRELIMINARY RANKER FOR SCORING MATCHING DOCUMENTS

The technology described herein provides for preliminary ranking of matching documents for a search query. A preliminary ranker uses score tables for scoring each matching document based on its relevant to a search query. The score table for a document stores pre-computed data used to derive a frequency of terms and other information in the document. The preliminary ranker uses the score table for each matching document and the terms form the search query to determine a score for each matching document. The lowest scoring documents are removed from further consideration by a final ranker.