Distributed NoSQL systems aim to provide high availability for large volumes of data but lack the inherent support of complex queries often required by overlying applications. Common solutions based on inverted lists for single terms perform poorly in large-scale distributed settings. The authors thus propose a multiterm indexing technique that can store the inverted lists of combinations of terms. A query-driven mechanism adaptively stores popular term combinations derived from the recent query history. Experiments show that this approach reduces the overall bandwidth consumption by half, significantly improving the NoSQL system's capacity and response time with only marginal overhead in terms of additional, but cheaper, required (storage) resources.