The present invention provides a method and system for identifying, retrieving and presenting electronic documents responsive to user queries. The three distinct inventive concepts are relevancy ranking of responsive documents based on component query technique; cross-lingual searching; and search expansion using analytics of initial results to derive and generate a modified query. Each of these inventions enhances document search and retrieval systems and the three solutions may be used separately or in any combination. The three inventions apply in layers above an underlying search system, controlling the submission of requests to the underlying system in support of received search requests, typically originating with an end user. Invention (III) provides a semantic-expansion capability specifically utilizing the availability of language independent fields in the data being searched with natural language query terms. This invention is enhanced by incorporating the preceding two inventions.