SYSTEM AND/OR METHOD FOR OBTAINING OF USER GENERATED CONTENT BOXES

• US 20090192988A1
• Filed: 01/30/2008
• Published: 07/30/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 01/30/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Ravikumar, Shanmugasundaram, Raghavan, Prabhakar, Tomkins, Andrew, Ramakrishnan, Raghu
• Granted Patent: US 8,856,097 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/06 Buying, selling or leasing transactions

Abstract

The subject matter disclosed herein relates to a process for receiving, evaluating and selecting of content modules such as content summary boxes and landing pages for display on network-accessible search engine results page. In one particular example, potential content providers may be provided with incentives and guidelines for the preparation of content summary boxes and landing pages over an electronic communications network, and the resulting submissions can be ranked and published in conjunction with the display of a search engine results page over the network.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

providing an incentive for content providers to prepare content summaries for at least one subject;

receiving content-provider-prepared content summaries from a plurality of content providers via an electronic computer network;

selecting at least one of the content summaries provided by the content providers for presentation over the network in response to a search engine query; and

publishing at least one of the selected content summaries to at least a subset of the search engine users based, at least in part, on query subject matter.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the content summaries comprises content summary boxes, and further comprising including landing page access information in the content summary box.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the incentive comprises one or more incentives selected from the group consisting of:

attribution of authorship for the content summary;

monetary compensation based on user access to the content summary;

publicity for a content provider-chosen business, association, activity, group, website, product or service; and

inclusion of paid content in the content summary.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein said selecting comprises:

monitoring user responses relating to a content summary;

ranking the content summary relative to at least one other content summary directed to the same subject based at least in part on monitored user responses.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein the content summary is associated with the subject and is displayed to the subset of search engine users based, at least in part, on the subject of their queries.

6. The method of claim 2 further comprising:

providing an incentive for content providers to prepare landing pages for a subject;

receiving content-provider-prepared landing pages from a plurality of content providers via the network;

selecting at least one of the landing pages provided by the content providers for presentation over the network in response to use of the landing page access information by a user to whom the content summary is displayed; and

publishing the content summary to a subset of the search engine users based on query subject matter.

7. The method of claim 1 further comprising providing content summary guidelines over the network to a plurality of content providers.

8. An apparatus comprising:

a server system for receiving content-provider-prepared content summaries from a plurality of content providers via an electronic computer network, the content providers being provided with an incentive to prepare content summaries for at least one subject;

a selection of at least one of the content summaries provided by the content providers for presentation over the network in response to a search engine query; and

the server system being adapted to publish at least one of the selected content summaries to at least a subset of the search engine users based, at least in part, on query subject matter.

9. The apparatus of claim 8 wherein the content summaries comprises content summary boxes, and wherein the content summary boxes include landing page access information.

10. The apparatus of claim 8 wherein the incentive comprises one or more incentives selected from the group consisting of:

attribution of authorship for the content summary;

monetary compensation based on user access to the content summary;

publicity for a content provider-chosen business, association, activity, group, website, product or service; and

inclusion of paid content in the content summary.

11. The apparatus of claim 8 wherein the selection of a content summary is based at least in part on:

monitored user responses relating to a selected content summary by the users;

a ranking of the content summary relative to at least one other content summary directed to the same subject based at least in part on monitored user responses.

12. The apparatus of claim 8 wherein the server system is adapted to display the content summary at least in part based on a relation between the subject of the content summary and a search engine query.

13. The apparatus of claim 9 wherein the server system is further adapted to:

receive content-provider-prepared landing pages from a plurality of content providers via the network, the content providers being provided with an incentive to prepare landing pages for a subject;

select at least one of the landing pages provided by the content providers for presentation over the network in response to use of the landing page access information by a user to whom the content summary is displayed; and

publish the content summary to a subset of the search engine users based on query subject matter.

14. The apparatus of claim 8 wherein the server system is adapted to provide content summary guidelines to a plurality of content providers.

15. An article comprising:

a storage medium comprising machine readable instructions stored thereon which, if executed by a computing platform, are adapted to cause said computing platform to perform the method;

receiving content-provider-prepared content summaries from a plurality of content providers via an electronic computer network, the content providers being provided with an incentive to prepare content summaries for at least one subject;

identifying a selection of at least one of the content summaries provided by the content providers for presentation over the network in response to a search engine query; and

publishing at least one of the selected content summaries to at least a subset of the search engine users based, at least in part, on query subject matter.

16. The article of claim 15 wherein the content summaries comprises content summary boxes, and further comprising including landing page access information in the content summary box.

17. The article of claim 15 wherein the incentive comprises one or more incentives selected from the group consisting of:

attribution of authorship for the content summary;

monetary compensation based on user access to the content summary;

publicity for a content provider-chosen business, association, activity, group, website, product or service; and

inclusion of paid content in the content summary.

18. The article of claim 15 wherein the selection is identified, at least in part, by:

monitoring user responses relating to a content summary;

ranking the content summary relative to at least one other content summary directed to the same subject based at least in part on monitored user responses.

19. The article of claim 16 further comprising:

providing an incentive for content providers to prepare landing pages for a subject;

receiving content-provider-prepared landing pages from a plurality of content providers via the network;

selecting at least one of the landing pages provided by the content providers for presentation over the network in response to use of the landing page access information by a user to whom the content summary is displayed; and

publishing the content summary to a subset of the search engine users based on query subject matter.

20. A method comprising:

providing at least one template for the preparation of content summary boxes to a plurality of content providers over an electronic computer network;

providing at least one incentive selected from the group consisting of

attribution of authorship for the content summary,

monetary compensation based on user access to the content summary,

publicity for a content provider-chosen business, association, activity, group, website, product or service, and

inclusion of paid content in the content summary;

receiving content-provider-prepared content summary boxes from said plurality of content providers via the network;

selecting at least one of the content summary boxes provided by the content providers, the selecting being based at least in part on the results of monitoring of user responses to the content summary box; and

publishing the content summary box to at least a subset of the search engine users.