Content Portion Highlighting for Context-Rich User Interest Profiles
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current information retrieval tools, such as bookmarks, lack context and are inefficient for sharing and collaboration, as they do not provide explanations of the significance of the associated documents and can become stale or expire over time, making it difficult for users to recall and share relevant information.
Innovation Solution
A highlighting service that allows users to select and save portions of content from internet documents without additional software, enabling easy retrieval and sharing, while also providing a profile of user interests for targeted advertising and analytics.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Loss of information
If users save entire document URLs as bookmarks, then information can be retrieved later, but the bookmarks become stale and lack context about what is significant
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the document into portions and allows users to highlight specific portions rather than bookmarking the entire document. This segmentation enables users to save only the significant parts, maintaining context and reducing information loss while enabling faster retrieval.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent extracts the significant portion of the document through user highlighting. By taking out only the relevant content rather than saving the whole document, the system preserves context information and makes retrieval more efficient by focusing on what matters.
2Loss of information
If users highlight portions of content, then context and significance are preserved, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a highlighting service as an intermediary between the web browser and the document. This mediator handles the complexity of portion selection, storage, and retrieval, allowing users to benefit from context-rich saving without directly managing the system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The highlighting service automatically manages the saved portions, including storage, retrieval, and sharing. The system serves itself by handling the complex operations of maintaining highlighted content, reducing the burden on users while preserving context information.
3Ease of operation
If traditional bookmarks are used, then the system is simple to operate, but sharing and collaboration are inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The highlighted portions serve multiple functions: they can be saved for personal retrieval, shared with others, used for collaboration, and integrated with social media. This multi-functionality maintains ease of operation while significantly improving sharing efficiency and collaboration capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent enables easy copying and sharing of highlighted portions through various channels including email, social media, and direct linking. Users can copy the essence of the significant content and share it efficiently without complex procedures, maintaining simplicity while boosting productivity.
Data Source
AI summary
This invention teaches how one can identify user interests based upon portions of content i.e. at a finer level of granularity than known until now. Existing computer technology could identify that a user was interested in animals if he viewed a page about animals. The instant invention allows a user to select/generate/reference/isolate a portion of content, and s/he can do this without having to install additional software to his/her browser/device. Thus, we can now know if a specific user is interested in cats, and another in dogs based upon the content portions s/he chose to reference/interact with. A profile of a user's interests can be developed across a multitude of documents. This profile of the user's interests can then be leveraged for commerce such as: better, targeted, contextual advertising; developing analytics; and far superior insights into user interests can be obtained.