Method and apparatus for responding to end-user request for information-ranking

• US 20060041553A1
• Filed: 08/19/2005
• Published: 02/23/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 08/19/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Gula Consulting Limited Liability Company (Intellectual Ventures LLC)
• Original Assignee: Claria Corporation
• Inventors: Pingel, Adam William, Westover, Matthew E., Paczkowski, Remigiusz K., Lindsey, Benjamin, Vandevelde, Scott, Fairchild, Jason, Bennett, Dominic
• Granted Patent: US 7,836,009 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9562 Bookmark management
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99948 Application of database or data structure, e.g. distributed, multimedia, or image

Abstract

The present invention relates to an advanced search engine. The advanced search engine may include a client component for monitoring an end-user'"'"'s browsing activity, a remote server (may comprise one or more computers) for storing and processing data received from the client component, and a module that process web pages and serves search results to end-users. The advanced search engine may collect web pages for keywords of proven interest, fetch web pages requested by end-users, generate snippets or abstracts of the web pages, eliminate duplicate web pages, rank the importance of the web pages, and provide relevant web pages or links to web pages in response to an end-user search request for information regarding one or more keywords, for example. Particular aspects of the present invention are described in the claims, specification and drawings.

Claims

1. A method of ranking, the method including:

receiving, from behavior watching modules operating on a multiplicity of users'"'"' computers, information regarding the users'"'"' search engine usage across a plurality of search engines, including at least

keywords (including phrases) submitted by particular users to the search engines,

links selected by the particular users from results returned by the search engines, and

at least one of dwell time or documents viewed by the particular users when following the selected links;

ranking links corresponding to a particular keyword, using, from the search engine usage information, both (user access rates) and at least one of ((the dwell time) or (the documents viewed)); and

storing the ranks in machine readable memory, available in response to a search invoked with the particular keyword.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the search engine usage information is known to have been qualified before receipt to discount periods when a particular user is likely to have been inattentive.

3. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including filtering outlying observations of the search engine usage before ranking the links, by eliminating links selected by the particular users that were returned by the search engines less than a predetermined number of times.

4. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including filtering outlying observations of the search engine usage before ranking the links, by discounting dwell times that exceeded a predetermined length of time.

5. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including weighting the dwell time information to dominate over the user access rates and the documents viewed information.

6. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including weighting the user access rates to dominate over the dwell time and the documents viewed information.

7. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including weighting the documents viewed information to dominate over the user access rates and the dwell time information.

8. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including assigning approximately equal weighting, plus or minus 10 percent, to the user access rates, the dwell time and the documents viewed information.

9. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including assigning weighting ratios of approximately 2-1-1, plus or minus 10 percent, so that one of the user access rates, the dwell time or the documents viewed information is given approximately half of a combined weighting.

10. The method of claim 1, the receiving step further including information about return visits to a selected link within a predetermined time, the ranking step further including using the return visits information.

11. The method of claim 1, the receiving step further including receiving information regarding conversion of accessing the selected links into purchases or registrations and the ranking step further includes using the conversion information.

12. The method of claim 1, whereby result-biasing bot behavior is mitigated by further including in the ranking step, weighting the search engine usage information to give the search engine usage by a particular user a normalized weight approximately equal to other users with more or less search engine usage.

13. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including grouping selected links into bands and ranking the selected links within the bands.

14. The method of claim 1, the ranking step further including separately ranking selected links by the particular search engine that returned the links, then combining the separate rankings into an overall ranking.

15. A machine readable memory including instructions to carry out the method of claim 1.

16. A data stream including machine readable instructions to carry out the method of claim 1.

17. A device including one or more servers having logic and resources adapted to practice the method of claim 1.