Unconstrained hyperbolic 0-1 programming can be solved in linear time when the numerator and the denominator are linear and the latter is always positive. It is NP-hard, and finding an approximate solution with a value equal to a positive multiple of the optimal one is also NP-hard, if this last hypothesis does not hold. Determining the optimal logical form of a query in information retrieval, given the attributes to be used, can be expressed as a parametric hyperbolic 0-1 program and solved in O(n log n) time, where n is the number of elementary logical conjunctions of the attributes. This allows to characterize the optimal queries for the Van Rijsbergen synthetic criterion.