SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ACCELERATED QUERY EVALUATION OF VERY LARGE FULL-TEXT DATABASES

A system, method, and various software products provide for improved information retrieval in very large document databases through the use of a predetermined static cache. The static cache includes for terms that appear in a large number of documents, a plurality of documents ordered by a contribution that the term makes to the document score of the document. The contribution is a scalar measure of the influence of the term in the computed document score. The contribution reflects both the within document frequency and the between document frequency of the term. In addition, the static cache includes for each term a lookup table that references selected entries for the term in an inverted index. Queries to the database are then processed by first traversing the static cache and obtaining the contribution information thereform and computing the document score from this information. Additional term frequency information for other terms in the query is obtained by looking up the document in the lookup tables of the other query terms, and obtaining the term frequency information for such terms from the inverted index, or by searching the contribution caches of the query terms.