INTEGRATED LINK STATISTICS WITHIN AN APPLICATION

• US 20120023390A1
• Filed: 07/26/2010
• Published: 01/26/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 07/26/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Rockmelt Incorporated (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Howes, Timothy, Vishria, Eric
• Granted Patent: US 8,386,915 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/205
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/986 Document structures and storage, e.g. HTML extensions

Abstract

To enhance the user experience for users of an application, such as a web browser, the application obtains statistics on shortened links that are displayed in an application or that are associated with displayed unshortened links. The statistics may include, for example, a number of times that content available via an unshortened link was viewed via its associated shortened link. The statistics are applied to enhance the ability of users of the application to locate relevant content. For example, the statistics may be shown in visual association with a link, or a set of links may be ordered at least in part based on the statistics associated with the links, or the links may be visually emphasized based on the statistics.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method for indicating the relevance of shortened links to a user, the method comprising:

obtaining a set of content items from one or more remote content providers, wherein each of a plurality of the content items comprises a shortened link produced by a remote link-shortening server based on an unshortened link that points to a web page;

obtaining statistics associated with the shortened links from the link-shortening server, the statistics comprising counts of times that the web pages were accessed via the shortened links;

ordering the content items based at least in part on the counts of the obtained statistics; and

displaying the content items according to the ordering within a browser user interface.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the content items comprise discrete data units from a social network content provider.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 2, wherein the discrete data units comprise message postings obtained in response to a query string submitted to the social network content provider.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the content items comprise messages sent using a message sharing service content provider.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the statistics comprise a count of times that the web pages were accessed via the shortened links by friends of the user on a social network.

6. A computer-implemented method of indicating the relevance of links to a user, comprising:

obtaining a set of content items from one or more remote content providers in response to a query, wherein each of a plurality of the content items comprises a link, the link being one of;

an unshortened link for which a remote link-shortening server had produced shortened links, and a shortened link produced based on an unshortened link by a remote link-shortening server;

obtaining statistics associated with the links from the link-shortening server;

ordering the content items based at least in part on the obtained statistics; and

displaying the content items according to the ordering.

7. The computer-implemented method of claim 6, wherein the content items comprise search results obtained from a remote search engine, each search result comprising an unshortened link, and wherein the obtained statistics comprise aggregated statistics associated with the shortened links produced from the unshortened link.

8. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

displaying, within a user interface of an application, links pointing to content;

tracking statistics on interactions with the links of a user of the application;

providing the tracked statistics to a statistics server;

receiving a content item having a first link;

receiving, from the statistics server, aggregate statistics associated with the first link; and

displaying the first link within the user interface based at least in part on the aggregate statistics.

9. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, further comprising receiving a relevance measure that is based on the aggregate statistics, wherein displaying the first link based at least in part on the aggregate statistics comprises visually emphasizing the link responsive to the statistics indicating that the relevance measure is above a predetermined relevance threshold.

10. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, wherein displaying the first link based at least in part on the aggregate statistics comprises displaying a graphical representation of one of the statistics in visual association with the first link.

11. The computer-implemented method of claim 8, wherein displaying the first link based at least in part on the aggregate statistics comprises ordering the first link relative to other links within the user interface based at least in part on the aggregate statistics.

12. A computer-implemented method, comprising:

obtaining a set of content items from one or more remote content providers in response to a query, wherein at least one of the content items comprises a link pointing to content;

obtaining a statistic associated with the link from a link statistics source; and

displaying a graphical representation of the statistic in visual association with the link.

13. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein the statistic comprises a number of times that the content was accessed via the link.

14. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, wherein displaying the statistic in visual association with the link occurs responsive to receiving user input indicating the link.

15. The computer-implemented method of claim 12, further comprising visually emphasizing the link responsive to the statistics indicating that the link has a relevance measure above a predetermined relevance threshold.

16. A computer-readable storage medium having executable computer program instructions embodied therein for indicating the relevance of links to a user, actions of the computer program instructions comprising:

obtaining a set of content items from one or more remote content providers, wherein each of a plurality of the content items comprises a shortened link produced by a remote link-shortening server based on an unshortened link that points to a web page;

obtaining statistics associated with the shortened links from the link-shortening server, the statistics comprising counts of times that the web pages were accessed via the shortened links;

ordering the content items based at least in part on the counts of the obtained statistics; and

displaying the content items according to the ordering within a browser user interface.

17. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the content items comprise discrete data units from a social network content provider.

18. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 17, wherein the discrete data units comprise message postings obtained in response to a query string submitted to the social network content provider.

19. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 16, wherein the content items comprise messages sent using a message sharing service content provider.

20. The computer-readable storage medium of claim 16, further comprising displaying a graphical representation of one of the statistics in visual association with a corresponding one of the shortened links.