There is provided a search engine or other electronic search application that receives an inputted query in natural language. The search engine then analyzes the query in accordance with the syntactic relationships of the natural language in which it was presented, weights the syntactic relationships, and generates a result to the query as output, corresponding to the syntactic relationship of the greatest weight. The outputted result is typically an answer, in the form of a sentence or a phrase, along with the document from which the sentence or phrase is taken, including a hypertext link for the document.