Part-of-speech tagging for ranking search results

A method being performed by one or more computing devices including at least one processor, the method for utilizing part-of-speech tagging in ranking potential search result documents, the method comprising:

• assigning part-of-speech tags to words in a search query to create query word-tag pairs;
• assigning part-of-speech tags to words in a plurality of potential search result documents to create document word-tag pairs;
• and
• utilizing matching query word-tag pairs and document word-tag pairs to rank the plurality of potential search result documents relative to one another.

A system comprising:

• an information retrieval engine having one or more processors and one or more computer-readable storage media;
• a data store coupled with the information retrieval engine,
• wherein the information retrieval engine:
• receives a query including one or more words;
• assigns part-of-speech tags to at least a portion of the one or more words included in the query;
• reformulates the query using the assigned part-of-speech tags;
• and
• utilizing the reformulated query, determines potential documents for retrieval, in part, by matching the assigned part-of-speech tags with part-of-speech tags included in the potential documents.