Automatically inserting relevant hyperlinks into a webpage

• US 7,418,657 B2
• Filed: 12/12/2000
• Issued: 08/26/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 12/12/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: eBay Inc.
• Original Assignee: eBay Inc.
• Inventors: Gorelick, Richard B., Madere, Steven G., Mengerink, Matthew W., McCartney, Michael D., Wilson, David J.
• Primary Examiner(s): Hutton; Doug
• Assistant Examiner(s): HILLERY, NATHAN
• Application Number:
  US09/734,045
• Publication Number:
  US 20020107882A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,814 Days
• Field of Search: 715/500.1, 715/513, 707/6
• US Class Current: 715/234
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/94 Hypermedia Hyperlinking G06F40/134
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/954 Navigation, e.g. using categorised browsing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9558 Details of hyperlinks; Management of linked annotations
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/958 Organisation or management of web site content, e.g. publishing, maintaining pages or automatic linking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/117 Tagging; Marking up details of markup languages G06F40/143; Designating a block; Setting of attributes style sheets, e.g. eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation [XSLT], G06F40/154
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/134 Hyperlinking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/169 Annotation, e.g. comment data or footnotes
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0251 Targeted advertisements
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0277 Online advertisement
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/854 Content authoring
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99936 Pattern matching access

Abstract

A methodology through which a host site may automatically insert relevant links into a set of text. In this methodology, the contents of the text are compared against a database containing character strings, and the character strings from the database contained in the text are identified. Each of the character strings in the database has an associated link that connects to other webpages on the same website or other websites. For each character string of the database found in the contents of the text, the associated link is inserted into the text. In this way, only relevant links are inserted into the text.

Claims

1. A method for automatically inserting hyperlinks into a webpage containing text, the method comprising:

comparing the text to at least one character string contained in a database to identify specific character strings from the database that appear in the text, wherein each of the character strings has an associated hyperlink that is also contained in the database;

for each of the identified character strings contained in the text, inserting the associated hyperlink into the webpage;

designating a name for a product;

storing the name of the product as one of the character strings in the database; and

communicating the name of the product to a producer of the text, wherein the name of the product is designated from a plurality of names of the product that are utilized by the producer of the text.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the text comprises content of a newsgroup article.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the hyperlinks are inserted into the text of the webpage.

4. The method of claim 3 wherein inserting the associated hyperlink further comprises reconfiguring computer code used to form the webpage such that the identified character strings change appearance, and the associated hyperlink is selectable by a user that selects and clicks the identified character strings.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein only the first occurrence in the text of the character string is hyperlinked.