An assignment of importance to a term in a search query. If a term in a search query is found to match a word in a document, that word is given a “weight”. The exact weight of the word will depend on the emphasis given to the word by the author or its position in the document. For example, a word that occurs in a chapter title will have a higher weight than the same word if it occurs in the body of the chapter. Similarly, words that occur in data collections are also assigned weights, depending on how frequently the terms occur in the collection.