Method and system for establishing document relevance

• US 7,844,602 B2
• Filed: 01/19/2007
• Issued: 11/30/2010
• Est. Priority Date: 01/19/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Edifecs
• Original Assignee: Healthline Networks, Inc.
• Inventors: Katwala, Niraj, Patton, Nicholas, Pump, Jason
• Primary Examiner(s): Rones; Charles
• Assistant Examiner(s): CAO, PHUONG THAO
• Application Number:
  US11/625,224
• Publication Number:
  US 20080256049A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,411 Days
• Field of Search: 707/2, 707/3, 707/5, 707/999.002, 707/999.003, 707/999.005, 707/709, 707/723, 707/748
• US Class Current: 707/723
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation

Abstract

A search engine that provides search results which are ordered, in part, based on an automated analysis of the organizational structure of a group of documents, as indicated by the address of the documents, is disclosed. In one embodiment, a bot crawls various websites analyzing documents, and their organizational structure, in an effort to identify documents that have an implicit high quality based on their inclusion in an index. Accordingly, the search engine provides a greater weight in ranking document relevance to those documents that have been included in certain indexes, such as top ten lists, and A-Z lists.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:

automatically analyzing, with a bot, documents hosted at respective sources to determine whether respective groups of said documents are maintained in respective organizational structures at said respective sources, said organizational structures indicating an implied relevance of the documents with respect to topics associated with said organizational structures, said implied relevance being higher for those documents determined by said bot as being maintained within a respective one of the organizational structures than for those documents not so included in any of the organizational structures, wherein said organizational structures include an index which represents an arrangement of documents in alphabetical or numerical order;

obtaining, with a search engine and responsive to a keyword search, search results that include one or more of the documents; and

organizing the search results, at least in part, based on a weighting scheme that takes into consideration a score derived from said implied relevance.

2. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein analyzing the documents includes analyzing a directory structure associated with an addressing scheme of the documents.

3. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein analyzing the documents comprises analyzing content of one or more documents to identify text suggestive of the implied relevance of the documents.

4. The computer-implemented method of claim 3, wherein said text is suggestive of an indexing based on an alphabetical or numerical order.

5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the respective sources include servers, hosting respective websites.

6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the search results comprise links to documents satisfying said keyword search, and said links are presented in an order corresponding to an overall score based on said weighing scheme.