System and method for enabling search of content

Abstract

A system and method for searching content. The method comprises receiving from a first user metadata relating to generating a guide for content. A guide is generated relating to the content. The guide facilitates navigation of the content on a device. The metadata is forwarded to a metadata analyzer where the metadata is processed to produce processed metadata. The processed metadata is forwarded to an index server. An index is generated for the content based on the metadata at the index server. A query is received from a second user, the index is searched and a result is forwarded to the second user in response to the query. The result includes at least a uniform resource identifier relating to at least some of content. The second user may add additional metadata relating to the content.

Description

[0001]This application claims priority to U.S. provisional application Ser. No. 60 / 977,704 filed Oct. 5, 2007 entitled “Collaborative Search of Opaque Content”, the entirety of which is hereby incorporated by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Field of the Invention[0003]This disclosure relates to a system for enabling search of content, and, more particularly, to a system which can enable indexing of, and queries upon, opaque content.[0004]2. Description of the Related Art[0005]Referring to FIG. 1, the World Wide Web (“WWW”) is a distributed database including literally billions of pages accessible through the Internet. Searching and indexing these pages to produce useful results in response to user queries is constantly a challenge. A device typically used to search the WWW is a search engine.[0006]A typical prior art search engine 50 is shown in FIG. 1. Pages from the Internet or other source 22 are accessed through the use of a crawler 24. Crawler 24 aggregates docume...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Searching and indexing these pages to produce useful results in response to user queries is constantly a challenge.

The creation of a comprehensive search engine for Internet multimedia content including audio, video and photos is so far an unachievable task.

While search engines for documents and web pages are now very common and have been able to deliver good results, multimedia content does not lend itself to the same techniques used with textual documents and hence remains mostly not indexed and hard to find.

The challenge with multimedia content has to do with the fact that it is very hard to associate multimedia objects with textual metadata used in indexing.

With multimedia content, more often than not, no textual representation of the content is available and known methods to automatically generate a textual representation (for example by employing speech to text techniques) are very computationally intensive.

However any given page may have many different multimedia objects enclosed and so it is difficult to determine what keywords relate to what object.

To date, those techniques are unable to produce a useful multimedia search engine.

Another challenge pertaining to multimedia content is related to its discovery.

Even this rapid analysis leaves large portions of the web uncharted and undiscovered since the web grows too fast.

Going beyond pure HTML analysis will slow a crawler to the point that it becomes too slow to produce sufficient coverage.

None of them have proven sufficient to build an Internet multimedia search engine.

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