Abstract: An information offering system stores information on products and services along with attributes describing these products and services. Individual users are allowed to automatically register information on their products and services with the information offering system. By this method, the information offering system advertises products and services. Because the registration is done automatically by each offeror of a service or product, the efforts of a central administrator entering this information becomes unnecessary, thus making it possible to advertise more products and services efficiently.

Abstract: A lottery on a network like the Internet can be more easily attained by preventing impersonation and validating participation. In a preferred embodiment, the opportunity to participate in the lottery is a reward for viewing an advertisement. When the advertisement is viewed a lottery ticket issuing number is displayed as an image file on the browser of the user viewing the advertisement. The image file is sent from the server providing the lottery service to the browser with HTML source to display the number. The image file on the lottery server is deleted after being sent, so that if the user requests re-display of the ticket issuing number display, the number cannot be obtained. The lottery server maintains a database of date and time stamped. requests for lottery ticket issuing numbers to prevent multiple requests during a single session. The user is requested to input the number displayed by the browser to find out whether it is a winning number.