Apparatus and methods useful for desktop searching are disclosed. According to one embodiment of the invention, for each query, the
system evaluates if similar ones would give more results. If so, the
system suggests the user with one or several similar queries. Similar queries are based on indexed content so corrections conduct to (that is, lead to) at least one result. According to another embodiment of the invention, for each keyword of the query the
system computes a similarity value for a subset of all keywords of the index
database. The subset is composed of all keywords minus the ones too short and too lengthy to be similar. Therefore, each keyword from the query gets a
list of similar indexed keywords. According to yet another embodiment of the invention, the system replaces each query keyword, one after another, by a member of its similarity
list until all combinations of substitutions are listed. The number of results for each similar query is calculated. Corrected queries giving significantly more results than the original query are suggested to the user.