Method and apparatus for concept searching using a boolean or keyword search engine

Abstract

Concept searching using a Boolean or keyword search engine. Documents are preprocessed before being passed to a search engine by identifying, on a word-by-word basis, the “word tokens” contained in the document. Once the word tokens have been extracted, each word token is referenced in a concept database that maps word tokens to concept identifiers. The concept identifiers associated with the word tokens are converted into unique non-word concept tokens and arranged into a list. The list is then inserted into the document as invisible but searchable text. The document is then transferred to the server monitored by the search engine. Search queries are preprocessed before being passed to the search engine in the same manner. The query is first broken into word tokens and the word tokens are then referenced in the concept database. All associated concept identifiers are retrieved and converted to unique concept tokens. The concept tokens are then combined into a string and sent to the search engine as an ordinary query.