One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates accessing a compressed representation of a set of documents, wherein the compressed representation supports searching and partial decompression. During operation, the system receives a search request containing terms to be searched for in the set of documents. In response to the search request, the system identifies occurrences of the terms in the set of documents by following pointers through the compressed representation. This compressed representation encodes occurrences of a term as a pointer to the next occurrence of the term to facilitate rapid enumeration of the occurrences of the term. Moreover, the compressed representation maintains sequential ordering between adjacent terms in the set of documents, which allows fast access to neighboring terms.