FORUM SEARCH WITH TIME-DEPENDENT ACTIVITY WEIGHTING

• US 20150215192A1
• Filed: 04/06/2015
• Published: 07/30/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 06/05/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Gary S. Shuster
• Original Assignee: Gary S. Shuster
• Inventors: Shuster, Gary Stephen
• Granted Patent: US 9,473,377 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• 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 16/9536 Search customisation based on social or collaborative filtering
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9537 Spatial or temporal dependent retrieval, e.g. spatiotemporal queries
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 43/10 Active monitoring, e.g. heartbeat, ping or trace-route
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/01 Protocols
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/535 Tracking the activity of the user network monitoring arrangements H04L43/00; recording of computer activity G06F11/34

Abstract

A search engine index measures and tracks one or more numeric indicators of activity at different times, including a most current time, in on-line forums and social networking sites. Such indicators may include, for example, a current volume per unit time of messages or data posted to the site, a moving average of such volume, a moving average of current participants over time, a count of current participants, other indication of site activity, or any combination of such indicators. The search engine is responsive to queries seeking forums ranked by activity for a defined time period, including a most current time. The search engine prioritizes search results to identify the specified sites or locations in order of activity (among other possible criteria) relative to a defined time.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

configuring, by a computer, a monitoring application configured to monitor forum activity in one or more online forums accessible over a computer network, wherein the forum activity is correlated to a rate of contributions from a plurality of clients participating in the one or more online forums;

distributing, via the computer network, the monitoring application to a host computer operating the one or more online forums;

receiving forum activity measurements from the host computer; and

publishing an index of forum activity measurements for each of the one or more online forums, using the computer, wherein the forum activity measurements indicate measures of the forum activity per unit of time for different past time periods.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising receiving a data request for forum activity measurements pertaining to the one or more online forums;

and

serving the forum activity measurements in response to the data request.

3. The method of claim 1, further comprising identifying the one or more online forums.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise counts of clients requesting access to each of the group of online forums within a designated time period.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise a rate of change in the counts of clients requesting access to each of the one or more online forums within a designated time period.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise rates at which participant contribution data is posted to each of the one or more online forums within a designated time period.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise a rate of change in the rates at which participant contribution data is posted to each of the one or more online forums within a designated time period.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise a quality of data received per unit time.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising receiving the forum activity measurements at periodic intervals.

10. A system comprising:

a server comprising a computer processor and memory, configured for serving a search engine interface and handling search requests from clients;

an activity index application implemented in a processor and memory operatively associated with the server, and configured provide an index of forum activity measurements for each of one or more online forums, wherein the forum activity measurements indicate measures of the forum activity per unit of time for different past time periods.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein the server is further configured to rank search results responsive to searches for online forums according to the forum activity measurements from the activity index application.

12. The system of claim 10, further comprising an activity monitoring application implemented in a processor and memory operatively associated with the activity index application, and configured to monitor the forum activity in the one or more online forums.

13. The system of claim 10, wherein the server is further configured for receiving a data request for forum activity measurements pertaining to the one or more online forums;

and

serving the forum activity measurements in response to the data request.

14. The system of claim 10, wherein forum activity measurements comprise counts of clients requesting access to each of the group of online forums within a designated time period.

15. The system of claim 10, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise a rate of change in the counts of clients requesting access to each of the one or more online forums within a designated time period.

16. The system of claim 10, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise rates at which participant contribution data is posted to each of the one or more online forums within a designated time period.

17. The system of claim 10, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise a rate of change in the rates at which participant contribution data is posted to each of the one or more online forums within a designated time period.

18. The system of claim 10, wherein the forum activity measurements comprise a measure of quality of participant contribution data posted to each of the one or more online forums.

20. The computer-readable medium of claim 18, further comprising instructions configured, when executed by a computer processor, to cause the computer to calculate average forum activity at cyclically recurring time periods as a measure of forum activity maintained in the database.

21. The computer-readable medium of claim 18, further comprising instructions configured, when executed by a computer processor, to cause the computer to determine one or more cyclically recurring time periods for each online forum during which average forum activity achieves a maximum value.

19. A non-transitory computer-readable medium encoded with instructions configured, when executed by a computer processor, to cause the computer to:

measure forum activity in online forums accessible over a computer network, wherein the forum activity is defined based on a rate of user-contributed content by all clients posting messages to the online forums; and

maintain the forum activity measurements in a database, the forum activity measurements indicating the forum activity per unit of time for different past time periods in association with identifiers for respective ones of the online forums.