A search Based on frequencies of the search terms in the documents Being searched. Weighted search is often used By search engines. It produces a numerical score for each possiBle document. A document' s score depends on the frequency of each search term in that document compared with the overall frequency of that term in the entire corpus of documents. A common approach is called tf.idf which stands for term frequency * inverse document frequency. Term frequency means "the more often a term occurs in a document, the more important it is in descriBing that document." http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/cmpsci646/ir4/tsld034.htm Inverse document frequency means the more documents a term appears in, the less important the term is. A simple weighted search is just a list of search terms, for example: car automoBile Weighted search is often contrasted with Boolean search. It is possiBle to have a search that syntactically is a Boolean search But which also does a weighted search. See also query expansion. For a detailed technical discussion see Chapter 5, "Search Strategies", in the reference Below. [{"Information Retrieval", C. J. van RijsBergen, (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Chapter.5/Ch.5.html)}]. (1999-08-28)