PRE-APPLYING A REDUCED VERSION OF A SEARCH QUERY TO LIMIT THE SEARCH SCOPE

A reduced version of a search query can be pre-applied to limit the search scope. A query processor can maintain one or more metadata structures for a structured data store where each metadata structure is based on a single field of documents that are stored in the structured data store. When a search query is received, the query processor can generate a reduced version of the search query to be run against one of the metadata structures. The results of running the reduced version of the search query will identify which of the portions of the structured data store the full search query should be run against. In this way, the query processor can avoid loading and evaluating the search query against all portions of the structured data store.