A system and a method for locating and presenting electronic documents most-likely of interest to the user. A plurality of search terms to be located in a set of electronic document is received. One of the search terms is selected as the anchor term, and occurrences of the anchor term are located within the documents. For each located occurrence of the anchor term, a set of search term occurrences is selected. These sets include an occurrence of each search term, and the occurrences are selected by choosing the search term occurrences that are closest to a desired placement for the search terms. With each set of search terms, the method associates a value indicating the extent to which the selected occurrences vary from the desired placement. The electronic documents are ranked and presented to the user in accordance with this value. The invention further includes systems and methods for locating and presenting Web pages and for searching the Internet.