Search engine facility with automated knowledge retrieval, generation and maintenance

Abstract

A system generates and retrieves relevant electronic information required by a user initiating an electronic search on the system. The system comprises a user-interactive search engine and a knowledge database, which stores knowledge information that is formatted. Additionally, the system includes a plurality of functional software modules that enables a user to complete an interactive search and find a solution to a task based on entered context information and keywords. A list of keywords is displayed to the user and the user selects those keywords that are relevant to the solution desired. The search engine looks for the articles containing the identified keywords. If no article is found with the search terms, the search is expanded to the Internet. The user may then modify the information returned from the Internet, format the information and save the information as a new recipe.

Description

RELATED PATENT APPLICATIONS [0001] The present application is a divisional of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 334,255 (Atty. Docket No. AUS920020671US1), filed on Dec. 31, 2002, and entitled, “Search Engine Facility with Automated Knowledge Retrieval, Generation and Maintenance,” which is incorporated herein by reference. [0002] Additionally, the present patent application shares specification text and figures with the following applications, which were filed concurrently with the above referenced parent application: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10 / 334,256, entitled “Dynamically Updating A Search Engine's Knowledge and Process Database By Tracking and Saving User Interactions (now abandoned);” and U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,536, entitled “Automated Maintenance of an Electronic Database Via A Point System Implementation.” The contents of these applications are incorporated herein by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] 1. Technical Field [0004] The present invention relates ...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Despite this narrowing of searches based on the level at which the search is conducted, however, search engines are unable to always return items of relevance to the specific context in which the user is interested.

There are several other limitations with present search engines and the methods by which databases being accessed by these search engines provide data to the requestor.

For example, current search engines, particularly those with access to a large amount of information such as the Internet, often return a long list of search results containing a lot of noise documents.

From the user's perspective, the results of such searches often are too large to investigate, while at the same time the results do not contain enough relevant documents to be useful.

Further, no assistance is given by the search engine to help the user understand how the documents relate to each other, or to the task that the user is trying to accomplish.

Thus, the results of such searches are often unusable because hundreds of articles are returned but the type of information presented in each article is unspecified.

As with public accessible databases, however, the number of documents in the commercially available databases continually increases by many orders of magnitude, and the number of irrelevant hits to each search has increased.

Another limitation with existing search engines involves the inability of the search engine to improve its search features for a particular topic / search term that is searched for by multiple users on a recurring basis.

This limitation is very visible with Internet-based search engines.

This procedure is often tedious and inefficient.

Thus, when a next (or the same) user later completes the same search, that next user is forced to go through the tedious tasks of working back and forth through the list of articles and book-marking useful articles.

Notably, depending on the search engine, the same search made at another time may not provide the same result set and may actually exclude articles of relevance to the topic being researched that are not identified by the search term.

Also, there is no way to maintain and update a database of information utilized by the search engine without substantial manual effort by system administrative personnel.

Thus, there is currently no way for a user to provide context information that will enable the search engine to provide more accurate / relevant results.

There is also no way for the search engine to utilize the results of a prior search and the efforts of one user to narrow the results to include truly relevant data so that the effort required by a later user requesting the same information is substantially reduced.

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