Arrangements and methods for providing for the efficient implementation of ranked keyword searches on graph-structured data. Since it is difficult to directly build indexes for general schemaless graphs, conventional techniques highly rely on graph traversal in running time. The previous lack of more knowledge about graphs also resulted in great difficulties in applying pruning techniques. To address these problems, there is introduced herein a new scoring function while the block is used as an intermediate access level; the result is an opportunity to create sophisticated indexes for keyword search. Also proposed herein is a cost-balanced expansion algorithm to conduct a backward search, which provides a good theoretical guarantee in terms of the search cost.