Facility for highlighting documents accessed through search or browsing

Abstract

An information highlighting facility assists the user in evaluating relevance of accessed documents to the user's information need. The accessed documents may, for example, be identified by a search engine in response to a user query. When accessing documents identified as relevant by a search engine from other networked computers, the facility provides information highlighting to assist the user in determining whether the document is relevant. A model of the user's interest, which may include an augmented set of search terms, is used to take into account the general interest of the user as captured by an interest profile and context of use of the computer by the user, or a combination thereof. The model of the user's interest is applied to the document text as the document is accessed from its source. The highlighting of information about the document content may include highlighting of the terminology in the text, scrolling of the document to the relevant passages, identification of entity names and entity relations, creation of a document summary and a document thumbnail, etc. In addition, the model can be applied to a set of documents accessed by the user, e.g., to re-rank the top scoring documents from the result set provided to the user by a search engine or some other information providing services.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS [0001] This application is a divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09 / 578,302, filed on May. 25, 2000, and entitled, “FACILITY FOR HIGHLIGHTING DOCUMENTS ACCESSED THROUGH SEARCH OR BROWSING.” This application is also related to co-pending U.S. Continuation patent application Ser. No. ______, filed ______, entitled, “FACILITY FOR HIGHLIGHTING DOCUMENTS ACCESSED THROUGH SEARCH OR BROWSING”, (Atty. Docket No. MS 131774.02 / MSFTP240USA) and co-pending U.S. Divisional Patent Application Ser. No. ______, filed ______, and entitled, “FACILITY FOR HIGHLIGHTING DOCUMENTS ACCESSED THROUGH SEARCH OR BROWSING”, (Atty. Docket No. MS 131744.04 / MSFTP240USC). The entireties of the aforementioned applications are incorporated herein by reference.FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] This invention relates generally to the field of computers, and in particular to enhancing query results provided by a search engine. COPYRIGHT NOTICE / PERMISSION [0003] A portion o...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The information highlighting facility is a computer program that helps users find and read relevant documents on the web. It uses a model of the user's information need to determine if a document is relevant. This model is created based on the user's queries and other data, and it is used to analyze and rank documents based on the user's preferences. The facility can also provide suggestions for relevant documents based on the user's perspective. The model can be built using data collected from the user's computer or an external server, and it can be used with various web services. The facility supports various types of document analysis, such as termination marking, scrolling, re-ranking, document thumbnailing, and link analysis. Overall, the information highlighting facility improves the user's experience and makes it easier to find and read relevant documents on the web.

Problems solved by technology

Collecting and processing all or a majority of Web documents with an appropriate rate of updating the information that has been collected about these documents is often not feasible.

Indeed, the processing power and the network bandwidth are not yet up to the task.

However, there is also a more fundamental reason: because of the distributed nature of the data the services are not in control of the document change—the authors of Web documents can change them at any time, as needed.

That is why, among other reasons, search engines do not deliver the document text in response to the user's query.

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