One aspect of the invention receives a plurality of possible list elements and determines a first document space size responsive to a first query that incorporates the possible list elements and defines a first document space. It also determines sizes of second document spaces using a second query set containing separate queries each of which incorporates a different proper subset of the candidate phrases and wherein each of the different proper subset has the same cardinality and defines one of the second document spaces. This aspect also ranks the first document space and the second document spaces. Once the document spaces are ranked, documents are identified so that list elements can be extracted from at least one of the identified documents and presented (for example, displayed, returned in a database, returned in response to a function or subroutine call, etc.).