1. In a computerized search system in which queries are submitted by users who receive, in response, a list of documents selected from a corpus of documents wherein the list comprises documents deemed responsive to a user's query, a method of processing the query comprising: obtaining the query from a user; distributing the query to a plurality of independent computational nodes, each computational node configured to search a corresponding segment of an index of the corpus of documents; running the query in each of the computational nodes against the corresponding segment of the index of the corpus of documents to obtain from each of the computational nodes an intermediate results list of zero or more documents in the document corpus deemed responsive to the query; determining a number of results n 1 to retrieve from each of the intermediate results lists obtained by the computational nodes, the determined number of results n 1 providing a quantitative probability of not retrieving one most responsive result in an aggregated number of results, where the determined number of results is less than the aggregated number of results and the quantitative probability is given by a statistical formula: ( s - 1 n 1 ) / n n 1 , wherein n is a number of independent computational nodes and s is the number of aggregated results; and aggregating the determined number of results from each of the intermediate results lists containing the determined number of results or more into an output result list, otherwise aggregating all results from each of the intermediate results lists containing fewer than the determined number of results into the output result list.