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.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein the paragraph scores are generated using a limit on the number of times a matching search term can be counted for a paragraph.