Abstract: A search engine database may a segmented structure that preserves individual document references and allows updating as well as scalability. A set of segment managers may receive new, updated, or deleted documents and update a set of term matrices from which a published search matrix may be generated. The database may have a very large term dictionary and may use a hash function to create term identifiers without having to look up terms in the dictionary. The database may be maintained by many systems operating in parallel for high scalability.