1. A computer-implemented method of improving performance of a computer to provide expanded semantic searching of results in a computer-implemented search of a corpus of documents, the method comprising: a. operating at the search-controller level to mediate between a request function and an underlying generic text-search system and electronically receiving a query containing a set of search terms from the request function; b. by a processor, determining a topic based on the set of search terms and identifying documents related to the topic irrespective of whether the identified documents contain any of the set of search terms, the step of identifying documents comprising: c. performing a narrow search-term expansion by determining alternative terms to be combined with the submitted set of search terms to create a narrowly expanded search term set for use by the search engine, narrow search-term expansion adapted to result in an initial broadening of the sampling-search step (d); d. performing a sampling-search using the narrowly expanded search term set determined in step (c); and e. retrieving data from a set of sample fields as a sample set of the identified complete set of responsive documents, the set of sample fields being preselected to be language independent but strongly topic correlated.