System for fulfilling an information need

A method of fulfilling an information need based on contexts in documents and an index stored on a computer readable medium comprising the steps of:

• receiving a query containing a word and a symbol that matches any term;
• identifying one or more documents having a context containing the word, wherein the context comprises one or more terms surrounding the word;
• locating one or more different terms at a location of the symbol in the query within the identified one or more contexts within the documents;
• and
• ranking the located one or more different terms using a metric related to the number of times in all of the identified documents the one or more terms was located, wherein the metric is the number of times the one or more terms was located in all of the identified documents.

Computer-executable process steps stored on a computer-readable medium, the computer-executable process steps to fulfill an information need based on documents and an index also stored on a computer-readable medium, the computer-executable process steps comprising:

• code to receive a query containing a word and a symbol that matches any term;
• code to identify one or more documents in the index containing the word;
• code to locate one or more different terms at a location of the symbol in the query within the identified one or more documents;
• and
• code to rank the located one or more different terms using a metric related to the number of times in all of the identified documents the one or more terms was located, wherein the metric is the number of times the one or more terms was located in all of the identified documents.