Although browsing by component name and keyword browsing are not the preferred methods for finding reusable components in a large software base, they are needed to allow users to familiarize themselves with the components in the software base and to allow the software base administrators to maintain them. The software base was designed and implemented to support both keyword queries and named look up. The result of a keyword query is a list of those components that possess one or more of the query keywords. The list is ordered with those components that satisfy the most query keywords coming first.