373 results about "Web searching" patented technology

The present invention presents embodiments of methods, systems, and computer-readable media for advanced computer file organization, computer file and web search and information retrieval, and intelligent assistant agent to assist a user's creative activities. The embodiments presented herein categorize search results based on the keywords used in the search, provide user selectable ranking, use user's search objectives and advices to refine search, conduct search within an application program and using a file based, provide always-on search that monitors changes over a period of time, provide a high level file system that organizes files into categories, according to relations among files, and in ranking orders along multiple categorization and ranking dimensions and multiple levels of conceptual relationships, conduct searches for associations between keywords, concepts, and propositions, and provide validations of such associations to assist a user's creative activity.

Provided are a method and apparatus for providing a mobile voice web service in a mobile terminal. The method includes analyzing a web history of a user from web search logs of the user and generating a voice access list based on the analysis results, and performing voice recognition by dynamically generating a voice recognition syntax according to the generated voice access list. Accordingly, by limiting syntax required for voice recognition by generating a syntax suitable for a web context of the user, efficient voice recognition, which can be performed in a terminal not a server, can be implemented.

A system and related techniques automatically analyze Web search and other activity, to generate locality-selected results based on not just the user's location, but also the business or other content provider's location and the degree of local intent in the user's query. The locality or region to the user may be identified, for instance, by the presence of geographic clues or indicators in the general content of the Web site, for instance, the presence of ZIP codes, telephone numbers, town names or other semantic or other indicators which have some geographic connotation in search terms, key words or other query or semantic inputs. The user's degree of local intent may be automatically analyzed as well, for instance by the presence of terms such as “car repair” or “pizza restaurant” which may suggest the user intends to locate local goods, services or providers. The search service may then access a content database to identify ads or other media or content which match or correspond to the detected locality or region, such as ads for local restaurants, car dealerships, physicians or other services or products, and which correspond in location, working radius and degree of localness to the user's query. Because the delivery of localized search results according to the invention is specifically filtered for user-driven local intent, advertisements and other media or content may be delivered which better match the user's search objectives.

A system and method for aggregating rankings from a plurality of ranking sources to generate a maximally consistent ranking by minimizing a distance measure. The ranking sources may be search engines executing queries on web pages that have been deliberately modified to cause an incorrect estimate of their relevance. The invention supports combining partial rankings.

A system and method of web searching is provided. The method comprises defining one or more user preferred categories and conducting a search within the one or more user preferred categories based upon search criteria by comparing the search criteria to content information within each of the one or more user preferred categories. The method further includes displaying search results associated with each of the preferred categories which have matching criteria based on the conducted search.

Systems and methods for ranking Web pages based on hyperlink information in a manner that is resistant to nepotistic links are provided. In one embodiment, a Web search service is provided for returning quality query results. The vulnerability of existing ranking algorithms, such as PageRank, to Web pages that are artificially generated for the sole purpose of inflating the score of target page(s) is addressed. Intuitively, it is recognized that it is less likely to reach a particular page on a Web server having many pages via a random jump than it is to reach a particular page on a Web server having few pages, which implies that the influence of such a page upon another page by linking to, or endorsing, the other page is diminished. Thus, in various non-limiting embodiments, each Web server, not each Web page, is assigned a guaranteed minimum score. This minimum score assigned to a server can then be divided among all the pages on that Web server.

A system and method of distributed metadata searching is disclosed. The present invention permits an extension of the searching and retrieval functions of existing Internet web search engines by utilizing computational resources embodied in user computer systems and search browsers. By distributing the searching and scanning functions to the user level, the present invention reduces the computational and communications burden on Internet web search engines and crawlers, resulting in lower computational resource utilization by Internet search engine providers. Given the exponential growth rate currently being experienced in the Internet community, the present invention provides one of the few methods by which complete searches of this vast distributed database may be performed. The present invention permits embodiments incorporating a Search Manger (1001) further comprising a Service Results Manager (1013), User Profile Database (1012), Service Manager(1013), and Service Database (1014); a Light Weight Application SCANNER (1002); and a Search Engine (1008). These components may be augmented in some preferred embodiments via the use of a Search Browser (1003), Internet Communications (1004); Web Site(s) (1005), Web Crawler(s) (1006), and a Repository Database (1007).

An information retrieval system that deals with the problems of synonymy, polysemy, and retrieval by concept by allowing for a wide margin of uncertainty in the initial choice of keywords in a query. For each input query vector and an information matrix, the disclosed system solves an optimization problem which maximizes the stability of a solution at a given level of misfit. The disclosed system may include a decomposition of the information matrix in terms of orthogonal basis functions. Each basis encodes groups of conceptually related keywords. The bases are arranged in order of decreasing statistical relevance to a query. The disclosed search engine approximates the input query with a weighted sum of the first few bases. Other commercial applications than the disclosed search engine can also be built on the disclosed techniques.

Systems and methods are provided for improved web searching. In one implementation, suggested search queries are provided based on previous search queries and click data. A weighted bi-partite graph or index may be used to identify related search queries based on overlapping clicked URLs. According to a method, query-click log data of a search engine is processed to generate sets of suggested search queries, data corresponding to each suggested search query, and a set of clicked URLs related to each suggested search query. Additionally, or independently, methods may be provided for contextually correcting spelling errors within sets of suggested search queries using a contextual algorithm, and/or identifying and discarding sets of suggested search queries and URLs that lead to restricted material, such as restricted content and related URLs.

Context-based user behavior data is collected from a search mechanism. This data includes, for a given query, user feedback (implicit and explicit) on the query and context information on the query. A predictive pattern is applied to the context-based user behavior data in order to produce predicted user satisfaction data. Data mining techniques may be used to create and improve one or more predictive patterns. Predicted user satisfaction data can be used to monitor or improve search mechanism performance, via a display reporting the performance or identification of any queries with a shared characteristic and sub-par user satisfaction. A dynamically-improving search mechanism uses the predicted user satisfaction data to improve the performance of the search mechanism.

Techniques for performing inline searches in an instant messaging environment are provided. A user can implement a web search in an instant messaging window by entering a search query. A search query can be preceded by a predefined search trigger to identify the associated text as the search query. The search query is sent to an Internet search server, which processes the query and gathers search results. One or more of the search results is displayed inline in the instant messaging window to the sender and the recipient. The search result can be in XML or HTML format and can include graphics and hyperlinks.

A method for improving web search results based on analysis of users' offline activities that are related to their online search. Web search results, including local search results, for a user may be improved by monitoring the actions of users when not interacting with the web search engine. By monitoring “offline” activities (e.g., telephone calls) and matching a person participating in an activity (e.g., the person making a telephone call) to a search engine user, a set of preferences for a given user may be determined, which may be used to select and sort web search results for that user. Preference data for one user may be used to select and sort web search results for other users, including those for which the search engine does not have preference data.

We describe a search engine generator that automates the process of creating a search engine for a particular structured document written in a natural language such as English. The search engine allows more convenient and flexible analysis of information stored in natural language documents than is currently available with World Wide Web search engines or portal builders. Specifically, it displays matching records in a tabular format for easy comparison; this may include information calculated with data from the document. Further, the search engine's graphical user interface (GUI) is available in different natural languages to facilitate searches by international users, and the GUI has a customizable graphic design.

The subject invention relates to probabilistic models that are trained from transitions among various topics of pages visited by a sample population of search users. In one aspect, probabilistic models of topic transitions are learned for individual users and groups of users. Topic transitions for individuals versus larger groups are analyzed, wherein the relative accuracies of personal models of topic dynamics with models constructed from sets of pages drawn from similar groups and from a larger population of users are compared. To exploit temporal dynamics, the accuracy of these models are tested for predicting transitions in topics of visits at increasingly more distant times in the future. The models can be applied to search topic dynamics of tagged pages, and then utilized to predict topics of subsequent pages visited by users.

To provide an enhanced customer service experience, various combinations of web searches, site-specific filtering tools and syndicated feed readers can be used to find relevant posts on the internet. Internal email, IM, phone, and the like can cooperate with an appropriately equipped expert-finding solution to assist with help in locating the experts qualified to respond to the post(s). The leveraging of RSS/Atom feeds or similar technology, content analysis, and contact center work distribution algorithms are leveraged to monitor the feeds from multiple sites and automatically distribute messages to appropriately skilled contact center agents. Each message discovered is analyzed to determine which contact center queue it is to be routed to, and then the contact center assigns it to an appropriate agent. This eliminates or significantly reduces the amount of manual searching and qualification of posts.

A method and apparatus is provided for visually coding or sorting search results based on the similarity of the search results to one or more concepts. A search query containing search terms is used to conduct a web search and obtain search results comprising a number of document surrogates describing the located web pages. Concepts are obtained using the search terms and the similarities between the obtained concepts and the search results are evaluated. The search results are then displayed in a manner that indicates the relative similarity of search results to one or more of the determined concepts, such as by sorting the search results based on the level of similarity of the search results to one or more concepts or by providing an accordance indicator with each displayed search result the accordance indicators indicating the similarity of the corresponding search result with one ore more of the concepts.

A system and method for a comparative web search engines, search result summarization, web snippet processing, comparison analysis, information visualization, meta-clustering, and quantitative evaluation of web snippet quality are disclosed. The present invention extends the capabilities of web searching and informational retrieval by providing a succinct comparative summary of search results at either the object or thematic levels.

A method for characterizing image contents automatically or semi-automatically using image acquisition parameters and metadata is presented. The method establishes probabilistic and deterministic relationships between different types of metadata and the semantic attributes and contents of images. It furnishes a mechanism that enables the automatic and semi-automatic classification, annotation, tagging, indexing, searching, identification or retrieval of images based on their contents, semantic properties and metadata characteristics. The method uses, but is not limited to, image capture metadata such as focal length, exposure time, relative aperture, flash information, ISO setting, angle of view, subject distance, timestamp, GPS information as well as other forms of metadata, including but not limited to, captions, keywords, headings, tags, comments, remarks, titles which may be automatically, semi-automatically, or manually generated. The present invention can be applied to image databases, web searching, personal search, community search, broad-based or vertical search engines for internet, intranet, extranet or other usages.