The same steps are used to locate the vectors representing the text of queries and new documents within the document space of an existing LSI index. By a simple transformation of the A = T S DT equation into the equivalent D = AT T S−1 equation, a new vector, d, for a query or for a new document can be created by computing a new column in A and then multiplying the new column by T S−1. The new column in A is computed using the originally derived global term weights and applying the same local weighting function to the terms in the query or in the new document.