Abstract: A method and system for fast indexing and searching of text in compound-word languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, and Arabic. Computer codings of such compound-word languages often contain different character types, e.g. the shift-JIS coding of Japanese represents kanji, katakana, hiragana, and roman characters with different codings in the same character set, to form index terms and search terms. In a preferred embodiment, a content-index search system is invoked in response to a query on a collection of objects. The collection of objects is indexed by the content-index and may, for example, be a corpus of documents indexed by the terms contained in the documents. A content-index search system uses the content-index to generate and store an initial search result in response to the query; a direct search system is used in certain situations. The content-index contains, for each of a plurality of terms, a reference to each object.