A system and method of compression indexing and efficient proximity search of text data permits high speed search featuring ranking the relevance of search results according to closeness of desired terms within each portion of text found. The system includes (a) preparing target text, (b) creating a "compression index ebook", (c) browsing in a compression index ebook, and (d) searching in a compression index ebook. To create the compression index, the method includes the steps of selecting target text, identifying tokens, such as words and punctuation strings, wherein each of the tokens has a frequency. The frequencies of each token are counted. Tokens are ranked from highest frequency to lowest frequency. The frequencies are compressed. The next step is assigning positions to each token frequency and compressing the positions to form a compression index ebook, which is stored in random access memory to eliminate disk seeks during browsing and searching.