Methods and systems for indexing a plurality of documents, each document comprising a text portion, the method parses the text portion of each of the plurality of documents to form a plurality of respective local document indexes each associated with a respective document, and stores the local document index in a database, Each local document index has a plurality of local text terms and a local weighting associated with each text term From the plurality of local document indexes, forming a global document index associated with each global text term. The global weighting is determined with respect to a parameter associated with a reference global text term. Also, methods and systems for analyzing a text portion, retrieving documents from a database relevant to the text portion and for refining the results of a search are disclosed.