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Methods and systems for dynamically suggesting answers to questions submitted to a portal of an online service

  • US 8,595,207 B2
  • Filed: 05/19/2011
  • Issued: 11/26/2013
  • Est. Priority Date: 06/14/2010
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. A method for dynamically providing search suggestions to a user of an on-demand service ina multi-tenant database environment, the method comprising:

  • receiving, at a host system that is remote from a user system, user input for conducting a search, the host system having a processor system including at least one processor and a memory system;

    regardless of whether the user input received so far is all of the input the user intended to enter, if the user input entered so far includes more characters than a predetermined number of characters, automatically searching, by the processor system, a storage area in the memory system at the host system for stored search terms from prior searches that are similar to the user input;

    automatically determining, by the host system, a score for the search terms from a set of factors;

    the automatically determining includingcapping a value for a given score by determining whether the value is greater than a predetermined threshold, and if the value is greater than the predetermined threshold, setting the score to the predetermined threshold,normalizing the given score by dividing one or more values that determine the score by a normalization value, therein as a result of the normalization and the capping, the score never exceeds a predetermined value,automatically determining, by the host, a ranking for the search terms found based on the score,the ranking being a value that indicates an expected likelihood that the user will be interested in the search term,sending, from the host system to the user system, the search terms found listed in order of ranking as search suggestions completing the user input.

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