Document search engine including highlighting of confident results

• US 20040255237A1
• Filed: 06/10/2003
• Published: 12/16/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 06/10/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Google Inc. (Alphabet Inc.)
• Inventors: Tong, Simon
• Granted Patent: US 7,836,391 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/501.1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results

Abstract

A search engine includes a decision component that determines whether documents that are returned in response to a user search query are likely to be very relevant to the search query. Links that refer to documents that the search engine determines to likely be very relevant may be displayed with visual cues that assist the user in browsing the links. The decision component may base its decision on a number of parameters, including: (1) the position of the document in a ranked list of search results, (2) the click through rate of the document, (3) relevance scores for the document and other documents that are returned as hits in response to the search query, and (4) whether the document is classified as a pornographic document (the search engine may refrain from showing visual cues for potentially pornographic documents).

Claims

1. A method for performing a document search comprising:

generating links to a set documents relevant to a search query submitted by a user;

determining whether one or more of the documents in the set of documents is likely to correspond to a document that the user considers to be very relevant to the search query;

associating a visual cue with the links to the documents in the set of documents that are determined to be very relevant; and

returning the generated links and the associated visual cues to the user.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the documents are web documents.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the visual cue is a thumbnail representation of the document associated with the visual cue.