A search system and method are provided that uses taxonomies, entities, facets, and ontologies to provide a user with a more comprehensive set of search results in response to a query. The search system has an indexing engine that performs one or more indexing steps that permit the search engine to return a comprehensive set of search results. For example, the indexing engine may index a document according to a set of synsets so that the search engine may use the synsets, during retrieval of results to a query, to return a more comprehensive set of search results.