Methods and Apparatus for Entity Search

• US 20090100049A1
• Filed: 12/17/2008
• Published: 04/16/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 06/07/2006
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Tamiras Per Pte Ltd LLC (Intellectual Ventures LLC)
• Original Assignee: Platformation Technologies Incorporated
• Inventors: Cao, Yu
• Application Number:
  US12/336,589
• Publication Number:
  US 20090100049A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access

Abstract

Methods and apparatus that deliver a searching experience that is substantially akin to consultation with a human expert, and that satisfies a user'"'"'s information need in fulfilling projects such as purchasing, shopping, procurement, bartering, requesting for quotes, in online retail, traditional retail, wholesale, health care, travel, real estate, restaurant-going, entertainment, logistics, and sourcing are disclosed. Search results often contain entities that provide services and products. Records being searched are associated with industry sectors in a broad sense. Industry sector information is first derived from a user query; and is used in determining relevant and adequate additional questions for a searcher, and in matching, ranking, and presenting search results.

Claims

1. A method of facilitating a search, the method comprising:

deriving an industry sector from a user search query;

selecting an existing request for quotes (RFQs) from among a number of candidate RFQs as a function of the search query and of the industry sector;

requesting additional information from a user by asking questions that are based on;

(a) selected existing fields of the RFQs; and

(b) modified on-the-fly fields of the RFQs that are modified based on the user query;

submitting a new RFQs created from the additional information as a second query to a search engine; and

presenting search results obtained from the search engine to a user via a web interface.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the modified on-the-fly fields comprise newly created fields.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of selecting a request for quotes includes selecting the request for quotes based on a language of the user search query.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of requesting additional information includes presenting the questions in a normalized format.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the second query comprises attribute-value pairs.

6. The method of claim 5, further comprising ranking the search results according to at least one of the attribute-value pairs.

7. The method of claim 6, wherein the ranking is according to a confidence measure.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of requesting the additional information includes offering the user a price range as a selectable option.