A free text search engine system, for an application, aggregates information sent to and received from a host by the emulator running the application. The information includes (i) field names and associated field contents for a display screen for the application, (ii) emulator action indicating sent or received, (iii) a screen image of the display screen used when the information was sent or received, and (iv) a hot link to reproduce the display screen. The system indexes field contents and field names in memory and searches, in response to receipt of a search query specifying a search term, the field contents and the field names in the memory that match the search term to form search results. The search results are ranked using a rank calculation based on various ranking factors.