Structured Content Search Engine for Mobile Bandwidth Optimization
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current search technologies fail to accurately retrieve relevant content from web pages, especially on mobile devices, due to limitations in exploiting structural relationships and layout structures, leading to inefficiencies in bandwidth usage and user experience, and struggles with complex search expressions and false hits.
Innovation Solution
A structured content search engine that analyzes tree and graph structures, layout information, and content category data to identify and return relevant document constituents, rather than entire pages, using recursive procedures and proximity operators to enhance search accuracy and reduce false positives.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If standard web search engines return entire web pages, then search coverage is comprehensive, but bandwidth consumption increases and screen real estate is wasted
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the relevant constituents (specific HTML elements, text blocks, or data fragments) from complete web pages that satisfy search criteria. Instead of returning entire pages, the search system identifies and retrieves only the necessary portions containing matching search terms, thereby reducing bandwidth consumption while maintaining search effectiveness.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments web pages into discrete constituents (such as paragraphs, sections, or structured data elements) that can be independently evaluated and retrieved. This segmentation allows the search system to return only specific relevant segments rather than complete pages, optimizing bandwidth usage while preserving the integrity of search results.
2Reliability
If standard web search engines return entire web pages, then all content is available, but user task completion time increases due to searching within the page
Solution Approach 1:
The search system extracts and returns only the specific constituents containing relevant information, eliminating the need for users to manually search through entire web pages. By delivering pre-identified relevant content segments, the system reduces user task completion time while ensuring all necessary information is available.
3Ease of manufacture
If sub-document search engines use string-based algorithms, then implementation is simple, but structural relationships and layout structures are not exploited
Solution Approach 1:
The patent transitions from one-dimensional string-based search to multi-dimensional search by incorporating HTML document structure (tree hierarchy), layout geometry (spatial relationships), and constituent properties. This dimensional expansion enables the search system to exploit structural relationships and layout information, significantly improving search accuracy while maintaining implementation feasibility through systematic integration of multiple data dimensions.
4Reliability
If mobile devices download complete web pages, then all content is accessible, but limited bandwidth and screen real estate are wasted
Solution Approach 1:
The search system extracts and delivers only the specific constituents relevant to the user's query, eliminating unnecessary content from mobile device downloads. This extraction approach ensures all necessary information remains accessible while dramatically reducing bandwidth consumption and screen real estate requirements for mobile devices.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments web content into searchable constituents that can be independently retrieved and displayed on mobile devices. This segmentation enables the delivery of compact, relevant content segments that fit within mobile device constraints while maintaining full accessibility to necessary information.
Data Source
AI summary
Embodiments of methods and apparatuses for searching contents, including structured search are described herein. Embodiments of the present invention use tree structures (or more generally, graph structures), layout structures, and/or content category information to capture within search results relevant content that would otherwise be missed, to reduce the incidence of false positives within search results, and to improve the accuracy of rankings within search results. Embodiments of the present invention further use tree structures (or more generally, graph structures), layout structures, and/or content category information to extend search results to include sub-document constituents. Embodiments of the present invention also support the use of distribution properties as criteria for ranking search results. And embodiments of the present invention support search based on structural proximity, search expressions with recursively embedded operators, predicates, and/or quantifiers, and applications to selection of advertisements.