Determining related terms based on link annotations of documents belonging to search result sets

• US 20070250498A1
• Filed: 04/21/2006
• Published: 10/25/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 04/21/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Shemtov, Hadar, Pedersen, Jan
• Granted Patent: US 7,711,732 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3325 Reformulation based on results of preceding query
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

Techniques for automatically focusing searches conducted by a search engine are provided. According to one aspect, revised query terms are automatically generated based on text in links that are in incoming (and/or outgoing) link lists associated with documents that are referenced in initial search results generated based on initial query terms. For example, some of the phrases that appear in incoming (and/or outgoing) links associated with a result document may be selected. The selected phrases may be added to the initial query terms to generate revised query terms. These revised query terms may be submitted automatically to the search engine in order to produce a more focused list of revised search results. This process may be performed repeatedly, each iteration revising query terms generated by the previous iteration, until specified criteria are satisfied, at which point the final revised search results may be presented to a user.

Claims

1. A method comprising performing a machine-executed operation involving instructions, wherein the machine-executed operation is at least one of:

A) sending said instructions over transmission media;

B) receiving said instructions over transmission media;

C) storing said instructions onto a machine-readable storage medium; and

D) executing the instructions;

wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the steps of;

generating a first set of search results based on a first set of query terms submitted by a user;

automatically generating a second set of query terms based at least in part on data associated with one or more links in a set of links;

wherein at least one link in the one or more links is one of;

a link within a document that was referenced within the first set of search results; and

a link to a document that was referenced within the first set of search results; and

automatically performing at least one of;

determining a second set of search results based at least in part on the second set of query terms; and

sending the second set of query terms toward a user that submitted a first set of query terms.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the data comprises anchor text that is to be displayed within at least one link of the one or more links.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

sending at least some search results in the second set of search results toward the user in response to the user'"'"'s submission of the first set of query terms;

wherein the second set of query terms is not exactly the same as the first set of query terms.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

sending at least some search results in the first set of search results toward the user along with the second set of query terms in response to the user'"'"'s submission of the first set of query terms;

wherein the second set of query terms is not exactly the same as the first set of query terms.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the data comprises hover text that is associated with at least one link of the one or more links.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

selecting a particular link for inclusion within the set of links based on whether the particular link refers to a document that is referenced within a top “

N”

subset of the first set of search results.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

selecting a particular link for inclusion within the set of links based on whether the particular link is contained in a document that is referenced within a top “

N”

subset of the first set of search results.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

selecting a particular link for inclusion within the set of links based on the particular link referring to a document that is referenced within the first set of search results;

wherein the particular link is contained in a document that is not referenced in the first set of search results.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

associating, with each link in the set of links, a weight that is based on whether text corresponding to that link occurs within a subject of a sentence in which that link occurs.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

associating, with each link in the set of links, a weight that is based on whether text corresponding to that link occurs within at least one of;

A) a title of a document in which that link occurs; and

B) a header within a document in which that link occurs.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

associating, with each link in the set of links, a weight that is based on whether text corresponding to that link is in at least one of;

A) a bold font;

B) an italicized font; and

C) an emphasized font.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the step of:

associating, with each link in the set of links, a weight that is based on a number of times that text corresponding to that link occurs within the links in the set of links.

13. A method comprising performing a machine-executed operation involving instructions, wherein the machine-executed operation is at least one of:

A) sending said instructions over transmission media;

B) receiving said instructions over transmission media;

C) storing said instructions onto a machine-readable storage medium; and

D) executing the instructions;

wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the steps of;

receiving first query terms from a user;

automatically selecting, based at least in part on the first query terms, and from among a set of documents, first documents.

automatically generating second query terms based at least in part on anchor text that is contained within links that occur within the first documents;

automatically selecting, based at least in part on the second query terms, and from among the set of documents, second documents;

wherein the first documents differ from the second documents.

14. The method of claim 13, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the steps of:

automatically generating third query terms based at least in part on anchor text that is contained within links that occur within the second documents;

automatically selecting, based at least in part on the third query terms, and from among the set of documents, third documents;

wherein the third documents differ from the first documents and the second documents.

15. The method of claim 13, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the steps of:

for each particular document of the first documents, determining whether that particular document is also in the second documents;

determining whether a proportion of documents in the first documents that also occur within the second documents constitutes at least a specified proportion of a total number of documents in the second documents; and

if the proportion of documents in the first documents that also occur within the second documents does not constitute at least the specified proportion of the total number of documents in the second documents, then performing steps comprising;

automatically generating third query terms based at least in part on anchor text that is contained within links that occur within the second documents; and

automatically selecting, based at least in part on the third query terms, and from among the set of documents, third documents;

wherein the third documents differ from the first documents and the second documents.

16. The method of claim 13, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the steps of:

for each particular document of the first documents, determining whether that particular document is also in the second documents;

determining whether a proportion of documents in the first documents that also occur within the second documents constitutes at least a specified proportion of a total number of documents in the second documents; and

if the proportion of documents in the first documents that also occur within the second documents constitutes at least the specified proportion of the total number of documents in the second documents, then presenting at least some of the second documents to the user in response to receiving the first query terms from the user.

17. The method of claim 13, wherein said instructions are instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform the steps of:

for each particular document of the first documents, determining whether that particular document is also in the second documents;

determining whether a proportion of documents in the first documents that also occur within the second documents constitutes at least a specified proportion of a total number of documents in the second documents;

if the proportion of documents in the first documents that also occur within the second documents constitutes at least the specified proportion of the total number of documents in the second documents, then suggesting the second query terms to the user in response to receiving the first query terms from the user.

18. The method of claim 13, wherein the step of automatically generating the second query terms based at least in part on the anchor text that is contained within the links that occur within the first documents comprises appending, to the first query terms, words that occur within the anchor text.

19. The method of claim 13, wherein the step of automatically generating the second query terms comprised automatically generating the second query terms based at least in part on anchor text that is contained within links that refer to documents of the first documents.