storing inverted document as a field

[jian chen <ch...@gmail.com>]

Hi, 

I am playing with Lucene source code and have this somewhat stupid question, 
so please bear with me ;-)

Basically, I want to implement a custom ranking algorithm. That is, 
iterating through the documents that contains all the search keywords, for 
each document, retrieve its inverted document and rank it based on the 
inverted document as a whole.

Because of this thought, I want to store the inverted document for each 
document as a field. 

My question is, is this kind of data structure fast enough for searching, 
compared to the current Lucene approach where the proximity data is stored 
in the .prx files?

I know Lucene has (sloppy) phrase query, span query, but I am trying to be 
more familar with Lucene by implementing a custom query. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestion or enlightenment!

Jian