1. A method of searching a collection of electronic documents, the method comprising: replacing a set of synonymous terms appearing in a paragraph with a set of standardized paragraph terms, wherein each standardized paragraph term has an associated term weight; generating standardized search terms in response to a search query; generating paragraph scores for paragraphs of a document based at least in part on the associated weights of standardized paragraph terms that match one or more of the standardized search terms; determining overall document scores for the electronic documents based at least in part on a combination of the paragraph scores; and determining a set of matching documents, wherein the set of matching documents is ordered using the overall document scores.
2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: generating sets of paragraph terms for the paragraphs of the electronic documents; standardizing the sets of paragraph terms to generate sets of standardized paragraph terms for the paragraphs; and associating a term weight with each standardized paragraph term.