QUERY LANGUAGE DISTRIBUTION HEURISTICS

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for performing local distribution heuristics. One of the methods includes receiving an original expression having a conjunction comprising a context term and a disjunction of a plurality of other terms. The context term and the disjunction are evaluated according to one or more local distribution heuristics to determine that the context term is a candidate for distribution across the disjunction of the plurality of other terms. In response, a transformed expression is generated in which the candidate context term is distributed across the disjunction of the plurality of other terms.