SCOPE TESTING OF DOCUMENTS IN A SEARCH ENGINE

A method and mechanism for responding to a query in a hierarchically organized system of documents and folders. In response to the query, a set of documents is retrieved based on specified criteria. Only documents in that set which match a specified scope are returned in a result set. Scope testing is performed on each of the documents in the set by obtaining a document identifier of each document, and then using that document identifier to obtain a document identifier of the parent folder thereof. The document identifier of the parent folder is used as a key to a data structure, which stores flags indicative of whether parent folders are in the specified scope. If the flag for a given parent folder indicates that the parent folder is in scope, the document having that parent is returned in the result set. If the flag indicates that the current document is not in scope, that document is not returned. If there was not an entry in the data structure for that key, prefix matching is performed on the parent folder to determine whether it is in scope. The parent folder scope information is then added to the data structure as a flag indexed by the document identifier of the parent folder.