If you have the space, one very effective way of speeding up the searching of your inverted index is to index it!

Once you have created your inverted index, you then create a second index from the first. This indexes pairs of words. The keys are pairs of words from your primary index. The values are the pages that contain the pairings. This vastly reduces the number of pages associated with each key. The cost is the huge number of keys.

A partial solution is to only pair unusual (low hit count words) with common (high hit count words) once you have excluded all the really common words ('a', 'the', 'it' etc.).

If the search doesn't include any uncommon words, the secondary index doesn't help, but you find that out very quickly, and there is no alternative than going through all the hits.

If the search consists of only uncommon words, then the results from the primary index will be minimal anyway.

But when the search incldes one or more common and one or more uncommon, the process of intersecting the huge list from the common and the small list of uncommon at runtime is expensive. Pre-processing these can substantially reduce the runtime costs.

It's fairly easy to setup but requires a substantial amount of (pre-)processing power to maintain.