Provided are techniques for building a search index. While building the search index and using the search index to respond to one or more search requests, an anchor information store is maintained, wherein each entry of the anchor information store identifies a referring document, a target document, and anchor text associated with a link from the referring document to the target document; a document is received for processing; one or more entries in the anchor information store for which the document to be processed is identified as the target document are located; anchor text is retrieved from each of the identified entries; and the retrieved anchor text is stored in an entry of the search index for the document.