Canonicalization of terms in a keyword-based presentation system

• US 20060074853A1
• Filed: 11/17/2005
• Published: 04/06/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 04/04/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Hong Che Liu, Ravi Narasimhan Raj
• Inventors: Raj, Ravi Narasimhan, Liu, Hong Che
• Granted Patent: US 7,401,074 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0641 Shopping interfaces
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 50/12 Hotels or restaurants
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing

Abstract

A presentation system accepts presentations or references to presentations from prospective presenters. Some or all of the presentations or references are stored in a database and referenced by keywords such that presentations to be presented in response to particular searches can be identified. A presentation manager handles accepting bids and settling terms between prospective presenters. The results of such processes might be stored in a presentation details database. A presentation server handles retrieving presentations from the presentation details database for presentation to users along with requests such as search results. Both the presentation manager and the presentation server can operate on a keywords-basis, wherein presentation terms specify keywords to be associated with particular presentations and the presentation server serves particular presentations based on keywords in a search query for which the presentations are to be returned. The association of keywords can be done using canonicalization so that, under certain conditions, different keywords are treated as the same keyword. Canonicalizations might include plural/singular forms, gender forms, stem word forms, suffix forms, prefix forms, typographical error forms, word order, pattern ignoring, acronyms, stop word elimination, etc. Conditions might include aspects of the search query state, such as the user'"'"'s demographics, the page from which the search query was initiated, etc.

Claims

1. Using a computer system with access to electronically retrievable content in digital form, a method of determining presentations from a set of presentations to present alongside search results, the method comprising:

receiving a request from a user in the form of a search query string;

canonicalizing one or more terms in the search query string to form a reformed search query string when the one or more terms meet canonicalization criteria;

applying the reformed search query string as an input to a presentation processor;

selecting, using the presentation processor, presentations to be included in the response to the request, wherein selection of presentations is done according to at least keywords associated with presentations in the set of presentations, further wherein at least one keyword is a canonicalization of at least one of the one or more terms meeting the canonicalization criteria.