Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for enabling end users to subscribe to information content, without requiring the end user to initiate the subscription process. User patterns are observed, and content subscriptions are offered to users based on these observations. Preferably, the user is allowed to customize the offered subscription, including conditions to be evaluated before content is considered as being of interest to this user, and/or one or more actions to be taken when the conditions are met.

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for programmatically determining one or more logical choices to be offered to users as conditions of a data query (e.g., for searching a content source), and enabling extensions to already-established queries to be programmatically created. A number of different aspects are described, and include programmatically determining all query conditions as well as allowing a user to specify (or request programmatic determination of) further conditions.

Abstract: Techniques are disclosed for enabling end users to selectively subscribe to information content, without requiring the content provider to provide a subscription interface. A user preferably views a content source (such as a Web page) in a Web clipper, and selects content of interest. In preferred embodiments, the user's selection are then communicated to a component which transcodes them into a markup language document, and this document is used to create a set of one or more conditions to use when evaluating whether a subsequent version of the original content is of interest to this subscribing user. The conditions are preferably registered with a content matching component, and one or more actions to be taken upon a successful match are also stored for use at the time of the subsequent content evaluation.