Concept Search

Searching electronic documents to determine relevance by analyzing the words and putting search requests in conceptual groupings so the true meaning of the request is considered. Concept searching considers both the word and the context in which it appears to differentiate between concepts such as diamond (baseball) and diamond (jewelry).

'Concept search' in litigation refers to the search of electronic documents on the basis of ideas they contain, rather than just specific keywords. Concept searching is usually implemented by broadening a keyword-based search to include synonyms or using a thesaurus to include results related to the ideas in the search keywords, even though not directly derived from the keyword search term.

A search which attempts to conceptually match results with the query, not necessarily with those words, rather their concept. For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

A search for documents related conceptually to a word, rather than specifically containing the word itself.