Search results presented as visually illustrative concepts

• US 20080133505A1
• Filed: 12/05/2006
• Published: 06/05/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 12/05/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Weber, Karon A., Chi, Liang-yu (Tom), Tripodi, Samantha M., Bayley, Oliver
• Granted Patent: US 7,555,478 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/5
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/34 Browsing; Visualisation therefor
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing

Abstract

A system and method for providing search results in visually illustrative concept format is disclosed herein. Concepts relating to a query term are identified. The search results comprise a conceptual search result entry for each identified concept. Each conceptual search result entry includes at least a visual content and textual content relating to its respective identified concept. The content for a given conceptual search result entry can come from different sources.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for providing search results, the method comprising:

receiving a query term;

determining contextual usages of the query term; and

providing as the search results a search results entry for each of the determined contextual usages.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein providing the search results entry comprises providing at least one image content and at least one textual content for each of the search results entries.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the image content and the textual content for each of the search results entries are obtained from different sources.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein the image content and the textual content for each of the search results entries are obtained from the same source.

5. The method of claim 2, wherein the image content and textual content have no pre-existing mapping with each other.

6. The method of claim 2, wherein the image content is selected from the group consisting of a picture, photo, drawing, animation, graphics, logos, video, audio, multi-media content, and thumbnail.

7. The method of claim 2, wherein the textual content is selected from the group consisting of a hyperlink, excerpts, and text.

8. The method of claim 1, further comprising identifying at least a first content from a first source and a second content from a second source for each of the determined contextual usages.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein determining contextual usages and providing the search results entry are performed on-the-fly.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the determined contextual usages are not associated with price.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing a focused search result page associated with one of the search results entries based on interest in one of the search results entries, wherein the focused search results page comprises at least a listing of URL addresses containing content relevant to the determined contextual usage associated with the search results entry of interest.

12. The method of claim 1, further comprising providing a contextual based search,result page for one of the search results entries, wherein an interest is expressed in one of the search results entries and the contextual based search result page comprises one or more contextual uses relating to the search result entry of interest.

13. A computer program product comprising computer-executable code for generating conceptual search results to a client device, the computer program product comprising code for:

receiving a search parameter;

determining at least one concept associated with the search parameter; and

generating a conceptual based search result entry for the determined concept, wherein the conceptual based search result entry comprises indicia representative of the determined concept to facilitate rapid disambiguation of the determined concept.

14. The computer program product of claim 13, further comprising determining initial search results based on a match with at least a portion of the search parameter.

15. The computer program product of claim 14, wherein determining at least one concept comprises determining the concept by identifying the concept from the initial search results.

16. The computer program product of claim 13, wherein determining at least one concept comprises using a concepts database.

17. The computer program product of claim 13, wherein determining at least one concept comprises determining more than one concept, and generating a conceptual based search result entry for each of the determined concepts.

18. The computer program product of claim 13, wherein the conceptual based search result entry comprises first data from a first source and second data from a second source.

19. The computer program product of claim 18, wherein the first data comprises image data and the second data comprises text data.

20. A computer program product comprising computer-executable code for facilitating user disambiguation of search results, the computer program product comprising code for:

dynamically identifying at least one common concept in search result entries obtained by relevancy correlation to at least a portion of a query term;

dynamically grouping the search result entries according to each identified common concept;

identifying a portion of content included in each of the grouped search result entries; and

dynamically constructing a conceptual search result entry for each of the grouped search result entries, wherein each of the conceptual search result entries includes the portion of content from its respective grouped search result entries.

21. The computer program product of claim 20, further comprising:

receiving indication of interest in one of the conceptual search result entries; and

constructing a focused search results for the conceptual search result entry of interest, wherein the focused search results comprise search result entries for the identified common concept associated with the conceptual search result entry of interest.

22. The computer program product of claim 20, wherein dynamically identifying the common concept is not based on a word match with at least a portion of the query term.

23. The computer program product of claim 20, wherein each of the conceptual search result entries include multi-media, multi-modal, content.