1. A method of determining a field-weighted score for a document having multiple fields relative to a query having a plurality of query terms, the method comprising: replicating each field of the document in accordance with a field weight corresponding to the field to produce an individual field set corresponding to each field in the document; combining each field set for the document into a virtual document; indexing the virtual document to produce a virtual document statistics; and computing the field-weighted score from the virtual document index based on the query.