A technique for suggesting patterns to search documents for information of interest includes acquiring a working set of spans for a document set that includes one or more documents. A list of one or more suggested patterns is generated by applying a pattern suggestion algorithm (PSA) to the set of spans for each document in the document set. One or more unique patterns are generated by applying a pattern consolidation algorithm (PCA) to the generated list of suggested patterns. Pattern information for each of the unique patterns is then generated. The pattern information includes a respective first count that corresponds to the number of times each of the unique patterns occurs in the document set.