US Patent 11281639 Match fix-up to remove matching documents

The technology described herein provides for a match fix-up stage that removes matching documents identified for a search query that don't actually contain terms from the search query. A representation of each document (e.g., a forward index storing a list of terms for each document) is used to identify valid matching documents (i.e., documents containing terms from the search query) and invalid matching documents (i.e., documents that don't contain terms from the search query). Any invalid matching documents are removed from further processing and ranking for the search query.