1. A method of accessing and searching information, and retrieving documents stored in document repositories with a search system application having a search engine implemented on one or more servers connected in a data communication network, where the application crawls and indexes the stored documents, thereby creating and storing an index of said documents, the method comprising: partitioning at least one of a document repository or an index thereof in one or more dimensions, where partitioning includes configuring the partition in a specific dimension according to two or more document attribute values, said attributes being selected from the same attribute category; applying a user-submitted query received by the search engine to the partitioned and configured index or repository; retrieving and analyzing the stored documents matching the search query; and returning a result set of at least some of the matching documents to the user.