A computer-based information search and retrieval system and method for retrieving textual digital objects that makes full use of the projections of the documents onto both the reduced document space characterized by the singular value decomposition-based latent semantic structure and its orthogonal space. The resulting system and method has increased robustness, improving the instability of the traditional keyword search engine due to synonymy and/or polysemy of a natural language, and therefore is particularly suitable for web document searching over a distributed computer network such as the Internet.