Abstract: Disclosed is a system which provides for the high-speed search and retrieval of both text and record-oriented information from one or more files stored in a computer or computer network. The system first creates a search file with a structure that can be quickly searched for each reference or boolean combination of references using, as input, either the full data to be matched or only partial data and "wildcard" symbols. This search file can be placed on a computer different from the original data files, to facilitate searching in a network environment.