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Ranking techniques are effective at finding answers in document collections but can be expensive to evaluate. We propose an evaluation technique that uses early recognition of which documents are likely to be highly ranked to reduce costs; for our test data, queries are evaluated in 2% of the memory of the standard implementation without degradation in retrieval effectiveness. Cpu time and disk traffic can also be dramatically reduced by designing inverted indexes explicitly to support the technique. The principle of the index design is that inverted lists are sorted by decreasing within‐document frequency rather than by document number, and this method experimentally reduces cpu time and disk traffic to around one third of the original requirement. We also show that frequency sorting can lead to a net reduction in index size, regardless of whether the index is compressed. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.