Method, system and software for searching, identifying, retrieving and presenting electronic documents

A facility including a computer-based search system configured to improve operational search performance of the search system to provide expanded semantic searching of results in a computer-implemented search of a corpus of documents, the facility comprising:

• a generic text-search engine;
• a search-controller in communication with the generic text-search engine and an applications services layer connected to a communications network for receiving a search query, the search-controller configured to mediate between a request function and the generic text-search engine and to electronically receive a query containing a set of search terms from the request function;
• a multi-phase semantic expander adapted to determine a topic based on the set of search terms and identifying documents related to the topic irrespective of whether the identified documents contain any of the set of search terms;
• whereby the search controller is further adapted to:
• a. perform a narrow search-term expansion by determining alternative terms to be combined with the submitted set of search terms to create a narrowly expanded search term set for use by the search engine, narrow search-term expansion adapted to result in an initial broadening of the sampling-search (b);
• b. perform a sampling-search using the narrowly expanded search term set determined in (a);
• and
• c. retrieve data from a set of sample fields as a sample set of the identified complete set of responsive documents, the set of sample fields being preselected to be language independent but strongly topic correlated.