METHOD AND APPARATUS TO REORDER SERACH RESULTS IN VIEW OF IDENTIFIED INFORMATION OF INTEREST

• US 20090006372A1
• Filed: 06/29/2007
• Published: 01/01/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 06/29/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Intel Corporation
• Original Assignee: Intel Corporation
• Inventors: Schilit, William Noah, Rosario, Barbara
• Granted Patent: US 8,195,660 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/10 File systems; File servers
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/93 Document management systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/95 Retrieval from the web
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising

Abstract

Various embodiments described herein provide systems, methods, and software to automatically reorder search results presented to users based on information specific to the user or the computing environment of the user. Some embodiments include a data store holding user or environment specific data that is used to identify search results that are more likely to be relevant to the user. These and other embodiments are described in greater detail herein.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

obtaining data of interest on a local computing device;

receiving query results in a first order in response to a submitted query;

scoring each of at least a subset of the query results as a function of the data of interest; and

reordering the query results into a second order as a function of the scoring.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the data of interest is obtained from a data store holding the data of interest.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the data of interest includes data identifying one or more properties of a configuration of the local computing device.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the data identifying one or more properties of the configuration of the local computing device includes data identifying one or more devices operable within a computing environment of the local computing device.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein at least one of the one or more devices operable within the computing environment of the local computing device is a device operative on local network to which the local computing device is connected.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the query results includes query results from an Internet search engine.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein scoring each of at least the subset of the query results as a function of the data of interest includes:

obtaining at least a subset of web page data of at least a subset of web pages represented in the Internet search engine query results; and

identifying and counting unique features represented in the data of interest that occur in the obtained data of each of the web pages.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein the identifying and counting unique features represented in the data of interest that occur in the obtained data of each of the web pages includes counting occurrences of each unique feature in the obtained data of each of the web pages.

9. The method of claim 7, wherein the scoring further includes scoring each of at least the subset of the query results as a function of a website from which the respective webpage is retrievable.

10. The method of claim 7, wherein scoring each of at least the subset of the query results as a function of the data of interest further includes:

scoring each of a plurality of features in the web page data;

weighting at least one feature; and

summing each of the features, including weighted features, to determine a score for each webpage.

11. The method of claim 6, further comprising;

deriving a value for each search result from a position of the respective search result in the first order; and

adding to a result of the scoring of each query result to the derived value of the respective search result.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

weighting one or more of tile score of each search result and the value derived from a position of each search result in the first order.

13. A machine-readable medium, with instructions thereon, which when executed cause a suitably configured machine to perform the method of claim 1.

14. An apparatus comprising:

an Internet browsing application;

a search result re-ranking module operable with the Internet browsing application to;

receive search results in a first order in response to a search submitted to an Internet searching utility through the Internet browsing application;

score each of at least a subset of the search results as a function of data of interest for the apparatus; and

reorder the search results into a second order as a function of the score of each of the scored search results.

15. The apparatus of claim 14, wherein the data of interest is data stored on the apparatus identifying one or more properties of the apparatus.

16. The apparatus of claim 14, wherein the scoring of each of at least the subset of the search results as a function of the data of interest for the apparatus includes:

retrieving at least a subset of web pages represented in the search results; and

identifying and counting unique features represented in the data of interest that occur in each of the retrieved web pages.