I recommend reading the Stanford paper[0] (page 12), which spells out in a lot of detail exactly what they were doing.
In short, your pathological query would have searched for every document which contained one of your words, discarded those which didn't match all, and then sorted by word proximity. I expect for a literal phase search, there would be a final pass to look for the exact phrase in order.
I recommend reading the Stanford paper[0] (page 12), which spells out in a lot of detail exactly what they were doing.
In short, your pathological query would have searched for every document which contained one of your words, discarded those which didn't match all, and then sorted by word proximity. I expect for a literal phase search, there would be a final pass to look for the exact phrase in order.
[0]: http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/1/1998-8.pdf