9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the search is performed in one of a desktop environment and a networked environment.
1. A method to be executed at least in part in a computing device for performing searches employing virtual documents, the method comprising: receiving a search request from a user for retrieving one or more documents matching criteria provided in the search request; at crawl time, identifying the one or more documents matching the criteria; identifying a relevant first document included within the one or more documents matching the criteria; identifying a second document embedded within the relevant first document, a link to the second document included within the relevant first document, a link to a third document included within the second document and a data source providing data to the relevant first document at crawl time such that the relevant first document and the data source is indexed in a single search; determining a relationship between the relevant first document and the second document, and between the second document and the third document; creating a virtual document representing the second document, the third document and the data source; uniquely identifying the virtual document to index the virtual document and to crawl through the virtual document in one cycle instead of multiple cycles; creating an index of search results including the relevant first document and the virtual document representing the second document, the third document and the data source; ranking the search results in the index according to a predefined algorithm; and providing the search results to a client application for presenting the search results and relationships between the relevant first document and the virtual document, wherein the search results are ranked taking into consideration the relationships between the relevant first document and the virtual document; and rending the relationships as a document mapping in a plurality of formats.