Patents by Inventor Farzin Maghoul

Farzin Maghoul has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 9064019
    Abstract: A method, system, and apparatus are directed to providing advertising information to a mobile device over a network. A request is received from the mobile device. The request may comprise a query, geo-location information, and/or a user preference. If the request comprises the query, a search result is generated based on a search for the received query and/or the received geo-location information. At least one virtual billboard is determined, wherein the at least one virtual billboard is in proximity with a first geo-location identified by the received geo-location information and/or a second geo-location associated with the search result. The virtual billboard may also be based on a type of the virtual billboard, a time, a user preference (criterion), and/or a keyword included in the query. The virtual billboard is provided to the mobile device. An advertising usage is recorded for the provided virtual billboard.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 6, 2007
    Date of Patent: June 23, 2015
    Assignee: YAHOO! INC.
    Inventor: Farzin Maghoul
  • Patent number: 9043413
    Abstract: Enriching emails includes: receiving a user's email messages; performing a semantic analysis on the email message body; deriving a plurality of objects of interest; associating search-based content with the objects of interest; ranking the objects of interest; and outputting the ranked objects with the search-based content into a current email message of the user.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: November 15, 2011
    Date of Patent: May 26, 2015
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Reiner Kraft, Farzin Maghoul
  • Patent number: 8903792
    Abstract: A search engine compares entered search terms to an index of terms signifying a specific or local intent. If an entered term matches term in the index, then the search engine identifies and outputs information corresponding to the specific or local intent. Terms to include in the index of terms can be identified by monitoring the searching behavior of a set of users.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 14, 2007
    Date of Patent: December 2, 2014
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Patent number: 8812511
    Abstract: A method, system, and apparatus are directed to providing information over a network. A search query may be received. If the search query includes at least one keyword matching a pattern associated with a specific search engine, a plurality of search results is retrieved from the specific search engine based on the keyword, and the plurality of search results is provided. A plurality of potential search or source engines may be determined based on a current time information. At least one of the potential search or source engines may be a personalized source engine. At least one plurality of results may be retrieved from at least one of the potential search or source engines. The result may be based on the search query. An aggregated result may be determined based on a time rule and/or the current time information. The aggregated result may comprise the plurality of results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 21, 2012
    Date of Patent: August 19, 2014
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Publication number: 20140108447
    Abstract: Briefly, embodiments of methods or systems for display of a location-related promotional message with search query results are disclosed.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 12, 2012
    Publication date: April 17, 2014
    Applicant: YAHOO! INC.
    Inventors: Anand Tolani, Farzin Maghoul
  • Publication number: 20130275405
    Abstract: Example methods, apparatuses, or articles of manufacture are disclosed that may be implemented using one or more computing devices to facilitate or otherwise support one or more processes or operations in connection with performing information searches, such as, for example, domain-specific on-line searches using social survey-type queries.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 6, 2013
    Publication date: October 17, 2013
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Patent number: 8484191
    Abstract: Example methods, apparatuses, or articles of manufacture are disclosed that may be implemented using one or more computing devices to facilitate or otherwise support one or more processes or operations in connection with performing information searches, such as, for example, domain-specific on-line searches using social survey-type queries.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 16, 2010
    Date of Patent: July 9, 2013
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Publication number: 20130124646
    Abstract: Enriching emails includes: receiving a user's email messages; performing a semantic analysis on the email message body; deriving a plurality of objects of interest; associating search-based content with the objects of interest; ranking the objects of interest; and outputting the ranked objects with the search-based content into a current email message of the user.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 15, 2011
    Publication date: May 16, 2013
    Applicant: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Reiner Kraft, Farzin Maghoul
  • Patent number: 8442978
    Abstract: The present invention is directed towards systems and methods for trust propagation. The method according to one embodiment comprises calculating a first feature vector for a first user, calculating a second feature for a second user and comparing the first feature vector with the second feature vector to calculate a similarity value. A determination is made as to whether the similarity value falls within a threshold. If the similarity value falls within the threshold, a relationship is recorded between the first user and the second user in a first user profile and a second user profile.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 2, 2006
    Date of Patent: May 14, 2013
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Pavel Berkhim, Zhichen Xu, Jianchang Mao, Daniel E. Rose, Abe Taha, Farzin Maghoul
  • Publication number: 20120158715
    Abstract: Example methods, apparatuses, or articles of manufacture are disclosed that may be implemented using one or more computing devices to facilitate or otherwise support one or more processes or operations in connection with performing information searches, such as, for example, domain-specific on-line searches using social survey-type queries.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 16, 2010
    Publication date: June 21, 2012
    Applicant: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Publication number: 20120150868
    Abstract: A method, system, and apparatus are directed to providing information over a network. A search query may be received. If the search query includes at least one keyword matching a pattern associated with a specific search engine, a plurality of search results is retrieved from the specific search engine based on the keyword, and the plurality of search results is provided. A plurality of potential search or source engines may be determined based on a current time information. At least one of the potential search or source engines may be a personalized source engine. At least one plurality of results may be retrieved from at least one of the potential search or source engines. The result may be based on the search query. An aggregated result may be determined based on a time rule and/or the current time information. The aggregated result may comprise the plurality of results.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 21, 2012
    Publication date: June 14, 2012
    Applicant: YAHOO! INC.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Patent number: 8145643
    Abstract: A method, system, and apparatus are directed to providing information over a network. A search query may be received. If the search query includes at least one keyword matching a pattern associated with a specific search engine, a plurality of search results is retrieved from the specific search engine based on the keyword, and the plurality of search results is provided. A plurality of potential search or source engines may be determined based on a current time information. At least one of the potential search or source engines may be a personalized source engine. At least one plurality of results may be retrieved from at least one of the potential search or source engines. The result may be based on the search query. An aggregated result may be determined based on a time rule and/or the current time information. The aggregated result may comprise the plurality of results.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 4, 2007
    Date of Patent: March 27, 2012
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Shiv Ramamurthi
  • Patent number: 8037070
    Abstract: A method of generating search queries based on digitized audio from conversations, including: providing a database having a global hot-list of universal popular keywords or phrases and a personalized entity list comprising keywords and phrases used with a frequency above a determined threshold value in conversations involving a user; monitoring a conversation between at least two people, including the user; identifying words or phrases in digitized audio of the monitored conversation through speech recognition; comparing the identified words or phrases to the keywords and phrases in the database to find any matches; generating a search string, without the user requesting a search, based on words or phrases found to match the keyword or phrases stored in the database; submitting the search string to a search engine as a search query; and serving a set of search results returned by the search engine to a display device of the user.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: June 25, 2008
    Date of Patent: October 11, 2011
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventor: Farzin Maghoul
  • Patent number: 7966341
    Abstract: Techniques are provided maintaining data that indicates for a plurality of query terms whether the plurality of query terms are date-qualified query terms. A query is received, and in response to receiving the query, the query is inspected to determine that the query contains a particular date-qualified query term. Then it is determined that the particular date-qualified query term has been associated with a plurality of dates, and it is determined which of the plurality of dates with which to associate the date-qualified query term for the query, based at least in part on the frequency with which each particular date of the plurality of dates has been associated with the particular date-qualified query term.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 6, 2007
    Date of Patent: June 21, 2011
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Kostas Tsioutsiouliklis
  • Patent number: 7962465
    Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for automatically annotating a document to offer, to a viewer, a choice of operations that a user can take relative to identified entities to which the document refers, where the choice of operations offered in relation to each such entity is appropriate to and based on the types of that entity. In one embodiment of the invention, for each “interesting” entity within a document, a mechanism automatically determines one or more types for that entity. The mechanism automatically annotates the document so that an application will present entity-type-specific data (including operation choices) that is generated by modules that are mapped to the types of the entities within the document. The annotations comprise metadata that indicates types of each “interesting” entity. The entity-type-specific data may be presented along with the rest of the document. A user need not navigate to a different document prior to viewing the data.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 19, 2006
    Date of Patent: June 14, 2011
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Reiner Kraft, Farzin Maghoul, Gray Norton
  • Publication number: 20110131282
    Abstract: A method for automating interaction with a messaging system receives a first message from the messaging system, associates the first message with a topic, assigns the first message to an identity associated with the topic, maps content to the first message, creates a second message based on the content, and sends, via the identity, the second message to the messaging system. The first message may be screened for quality and assigned a quality score, and if the quality score does not exceed a predetermined threshold, then the second message will not be sent to the messaging system.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 1, 2009
    Publication date: June 2, 2011
    Applicant: YAHOO! INC.
    Inventors: Reiner KRAFT, Farzin MAGHOUL
  • Patent number: 7844599
    Abstract: Applying a bias when determining a suggested search query. Examples of biases that can be applied include, but are not limited to, temporal biases and monetization biases. Temporal biasing involves increasing a weight associated with a search query, based on a temporal attribute associated with the query. Search queries may also have associated with them a parameter such as frequency, count, etc. One of these parameters may serve as a weight. In order to determine suggested search queries, the temporal attribute is used to modify or bias the parameter (e.g., frequency parameter). Thus, the weight of the search query is modified to temporally bias the query. The suggested search queries are determined based on the biased parameter.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 8, 2006
    Date of Patent: November 30, 2010
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Richard Kasperski, Farzin Maghoul
  • Publication number: 20100211432
    Abstract: Systems and methods for providing popular content are disclosed. Generally, a request for popular content is received from a device. The request for popular content includes at least one parameter associated with users that previously accessed the popular content. A popularity module identifies the popular content based on a frequency of users associated with the at least one parameter accessing the popular content. The identified popular content is then served to the device.
    Type: Application
    Filed: February 13, 2009
    Publication date: August 19, 2010
    Applicant: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Paul Yiu, Marc Davis, Farzin Maghoul, Jeonghee Yi
  • Patent number: 7747648
    Abstract: Systems and methods for information retrieval and communication employ a world model. The world model is made up of interrelated entity models, each of which corresponds to an entity in the real world, such as a person, place, business, other tangible thing, community, event, or thought. Each entity model provides a communication channel via which a user can contact a real-world person responsible for that entity model. Entity models also provide feedback information, enabling users to easily share their experiences and opinions of the corresponding real-world entity.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: February 14, 2005
    Date of Patent: June 29, 2010
    Assignee: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Reiner Kraft, Farzin Maghoul, Kenneth G. Perluss
  • Publication number: 20100082436
    Abstract: A method is disclosed for serving user queries adaptively based on whether the query is submitted by a local user or a traveler, including receiving by a search engine a query from a communication device, the query including one or more search terms; detecting a type of keyword term by a context detector of the search engine that indicates a geographic context of the query; determining whether a user of the communication device is the local user or the traveler based on the geographic context; and delivering geographically-targeted search results by the search engine to the communication device based on determining that the user is either the traveler or the local user.
    Type: Application
    Filed: September 30, 2008
    Publication date: April 1, 2010
    Applicant: Yahoo! Inc.
    Inventors: Farzin Maghoul, Jeonghee Yi