1. A method for ranking the relevance of each of a plurality of documents in a corpus to a search query of words comprising the steps of: a) grouping words in the search query by synonym into one or more word groups, said grouping being performed by a processing unit; b) for each word group, counting the number of instances (the “FQ” value) that a word from the word group appears in the search query, said counting being performed by the processing unit; c) determining, by the processing unit, the maximum FQ value among all the word groups; d) calculating, by the processing unit, a scaling factor K; e) for each word group, calculating a term frequency (“TF”) value by dividing the FQ value for the word group by the maximum FQ value and applying scaling factor K to the resulting quotient, said calculating being performed by the processing unit; f) for each word group, counting the number of documents (“FC”) in the corpus that contain at least one word from the word group, said counting being performed by the processing unit; g) counting the number of documents (“N”) in the corpus, said counting being performed by the processing unit; h) for each word group, calculating an inverse document frequency (“IDF”) value by dividing N by FC, adding one to the resulting quotient, and taking the natural logarithm of the resulting sum, said calculating being performed by the processing unit; i) for each word group, calculating a TF-IDF value by multiplying said TF value by said IDF value, said calculating being performed by the processing unit; and j) ranking the relevance of each document in the corpus utilizing the TF-IDF values for the word groups in the search query, said ranking being performed by the processing unit.