1. A method of optimizing a response time for retrieving relevant documents from a set of candidate documents identified in response to a search query where the search query includes one or more terms, the method comprising the steps of: assigning a term weight to each of the terms; associating a document to a relevance score bin based on a total matched term weight where a document that matches a total term weight of M is associated to a more relevant score bin than a document that matches a total term weight less than M; and retrieving a set of most relevant documents based on the association to the relevance score bins having a highest relevance score without retrieving other candidate documents.