A method of locating relevant documents wherein documents are given a fingerprint comprising weights associated with particular topic categories of a classification system, each weight representing a degree to which the document relates to the particular topic category, a first piece of text is identified and given a fingerprint comprising a list of other weights associated with similar topic categories, the other weights representing a degree to which the first piece of text relates to the particular topic category. All or a portion of the universe of documents is searched by comparing the fingerprint for the first piece of text with the fingerprint for each document. You select those documents whose fingerprints have a predetermined degree of mathematical overlap with the fingerprint of the first piece of text. A user fingerprint of the user's recently accessed texts can be used in place of the first piece of text.