the system of the present invention provides for a method and apparatus of displaying portions of text from multiple documents over multiple databases related to a search query . the initial step in this method is to identify a search query . based on this identification , a search against multiple databases is initiated . in particular , the computer system identifies auxiliary databases either within a network or between networks that are likely to contain documents relating to terms in the search query . upon identification of these databases , the databases are then searched to identify those documents relating to the identified query . the various sets of identified documents from multiple databases are then returned and processed to create an ordered ranking for the returned documents . text portions from the highest ranking documents across the multiple databases are then automatically displayed to the user .