The annotation of your collection is a computationally intensive process that competes for resources with other users of the Linguist's Search Engine. To ensure a fair use of resources, each AltaVista search job is assigned a priority. This priority increases as the search gets older and decreases as sentences are annotated. This means (for example) that a new search with no sentences annotated would have a higher priority than a day-old search that already has 10,000 sentences annotated.