Identifying a matching component is a recurring problem in software
engineering, specifically in software reuse. Properly generalized, it can be
seen as an information retrieval problem. 
In the context of defining the architecture of a comprehensive
software archive, we are designing a two-level retrieval structure. In this
paper we report on the first level, a quick search facility based on
analyzing texts written in natural language. Based on textual and structural
properties of the documents contained in the repository, the
universe is reduced to a moderately sized set of candidates to be further
analyzed by more focussed mechanisms.