Automatically inserting relevant hyperlinks into a webpage

• US 20020107882A1
• Filed: 12/12/2000
• Published: 08/08/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 12/12/2000
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: eBay Inc.
• Original Assignee: Halfcom Incorporated (eBay Inc.)
• Inventors: Gorelick, Richard B., Madere, Steven G., Mengerink, Matthew W., McCartney, Michael D., Wilson, David J.
• Granted Patent: US 7,418,657 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/500.1
• 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 the steps of:

(1) comparing the text to one or more character strings contained in a database in order 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; and

(2) for each of the identified character strings contained in the text, inserting the associated hyperlink into the webpage.

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 test of the webpage

4. The method of claim 3 wherein the step of inserting the associated hyperlink further comprises the step of reconfiguring computer code used to form the webpage such that the identified character strings change appearance and the user may select the hyperlink by mousing clicking on the identified character strings.

5. The method of claim 1 further comprising the step of providing a designation for a product to producers of the text, and wherein the database includes the designation as one of the character strings.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising the step of determining a general topic of the text, wherein the character strings contained in the database are selected based upon the topic.

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

8. A method for directing a user to a particular website, the method comprising the steps of:

(1) identifying said website in a newsgroup article by searching character strings in said article and identifying predefined character strings as corresponding to said website.

(2) adding a hyperlink to the website into a newsgroup article;

(3) displaying the newsgroup article including the hyperlink;

(4) accepting an input from the user to select the hyperlink; and

(5) redirecting the user to the webpage.

9. A system for automatically inserting relevant hyperlinks into the text contained in a file, the system comprising:

loading means to receive the text;

comparison means to determine if a character string from a database appears in the text, wherein the database character further contains a hyperlink that is associated with the character string; and

insertion means for placing the hyperlink into the webpage if the character string appears in the text.