1. A method of locating relevant documents within a universe of documents, the documents of said universe having been classified so that each document in the universe has a fingerprint, said fingerprint comprising a list of weights associated with particular topic categories in a classification system, each of the weights representing a degree to which the document relates to the particular topic category that the weight is associated with, the weights obtained automatically from a computer program, the method having a scalable time complexity of O(N x ) where 0<=X<=1.0 for a universe of text on the world wide web and comprising: a computer processor creating a fingerprint for a piece of text, the fingerprint comprising a list of weights associated with particular topic categories in the classification system, each of the weights in the fingerprint for said first piece of text representing a degree to which the first piece of text relates to the particular topic category that the weight in the fingerprint for said first piece of text is associated with, the weights in the fingerprint for said first piece of text obtained automatically from a computer program, a computer processor searching all or a portion of the universe of documents by comparing the fingerprint for the first piece of text with the fingerprint for each document in the all or a portion of the universe of documents, and ranking the all or a portion of the universe of documents based on a degree to which a document has a mathematical overlap with the fingerprint of the first piece of text, the method configured to locate the relevant documents within the universe of documents whether the universe of documents includes text written in one language or in more than one language.
4. The method of claim 1 , wherein a selected number of weights is between 1 and 75 and the classification system is the Dewey Decimal System.