SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING A RESPONSE TO A SEARCH QUERY

• US 20090150392A1
• Filed: 12/30/2008
• Published: 06/11/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 05/11/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: WW Grainger Incorporated
• Original Assignee: WW Grainger Incorporated
• Inventors: Westphal, Geoffry A.
• Granted Patent: US 8,051,067 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3338 Query expansion
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/953 Querying, e.g. by the use of web search engines
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99934 Query formulation, input preparation, or translation

Abstract

A system receives a request to search an electronic catalog of a vendor which specifies a query term. The query term is used to search an electronic catalog of a third party. The results obtained by searching the electronic catalog of the third party are parsed to uncover a keyword recognized by a search engine associated with the electronic catalog of the vendor. The uncovered keyword is then used in the search engine associated with the electronic catalog of the vendor to locate one or more items in the electronic catalog of the vendor. Items located in this manner are the search results responsive to the query term.

Claims

1. A method for providing a search result, comprising:

receiving at a server device of a vendor a request to search a hardware database device of the vendor in which is stored a representation of a product catalog, the request specifying a query term;

causing the server device of the vendor to use the received query term to initiate a search of a hardware database device associated with a server device of a third party;

using a software algorithm at the server device of the vendor to parse the results obtained by searching the database associated with the server device of the third party to uncover a keyword recognized by a search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor;

causing the search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor to use the uncovered keyword to search for one or more items in the hardware database device of the vendor; and

causing the items in the hardware database device of the vendor that were located as a result of using the uncovered keyword as input to the search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor to be displayed on a hardware display device as the search result responsive to the query term.

2. The method as recited in claim 1, comprising using a spidering program to search the hardware database device associated with the server device of the third party.

3. The method as recited in claim 1, comprising using an algorithm to rank the one or more items in the hardware database device of the vendor located as a result of using the uncovered keyword as input to the search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor according to a deemed relevancy.

4. The method as recited in claim 3, wherein the relevancy is determined based upon a type of the keyword recognized by the search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor.

5. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein the query term is entered via a hardware input device into a Web page.

6. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein the query term is provided via an email.

7. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein the query term is provided via an interactive voice response (IVR) telephone system.

8. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein the results obtained by searching the hardware database device associated with the server of the third party are parsed to uncover delimiters to distinguish between multiple items in results obtained by searching the hardware database device associated with the server of the third party.

13. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein multiple keywords are uncovered during the parsing and the method comprises allowing a user to select via use of a hardware input device one or more of the keywords for use as input to the search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor.

14. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein the query term is extracted from a customer master file comprised of data indicative of plural item entries.

9. A method for providing a search result, comprising:

receiving at a search engine device a request to search a first hardware database device which specifies a first query term which is unrecognized by the search engine device;

accessing a second hardware database device that is associated with a server of a third party via a network and causing the first query term to used at the server of the third party find a second query term that is extracted from the second hardware database device as a result of using the first query term which is unrecognized by the search engine device;

causing the second query term to be used as input to the search engine device to perform a search of the first hardware database device; and

causing results obtained from the search of the first hardware database device using the second query term as input to the search engine device to be displayed on a hardware display device as the search result responsive to the first query term.

10. The method as recited in claim 9, comprising storing in the first hardware database device a mapping between the first query term and second query term extracted from the second hardware database device through use of the first query term to thereby eliminate the need for performing the step associated with accessing the second hardware database device via the network should the first query term be again received in a request to search the first hardware database device.

11. The method as recited in claim 9, wherein the network comprises the Internet.

12. The method as recited in claim 9, wherein the first hardware database device comprises data indicative of a vendor product catalog.

15. A computer readable media having stored computer executable instructions for providing a search result, the instructions performing steps comprising:

parsing an input customer master file comprised of data indicative of plural item entries to discern each item entry and to uncover one or more keywords within the discerned item entries which keywords are recognized by a search engine associated with a hardware database of a vendor;

using the uncovered keywords in the search engine associated with the hardware database device of the vendor to uncover one or more items in the hardware database device of the vendor; and

providing the one or more items in the hardware database device of the vendor as the search result.