Abstract: A searchable web site discovery and recommendation system and method for discovering and recommending searchable web sites to a user of a search engine. In general, given a search query by a user embodiments of the system and method discover and then recommend a list of searchable web sites. Embodiments of the system and method discover and recommend searchable web sites using client-side query behavior logs. A set of descriptive features is automatically extracted from the logs. In addition, embodiments of the system and method expand the initial search query by submitting the query to a general search engine and leveraging snippets from the search engine results. Embodiments of the system and method model a conditional probability of a searchable web site based on four components and the extracted descriptive features. A ranked list of recommended searchable web sites is obtained from the conditional probability and displayed to a user.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, for blending mobile search results. A method includes receiving a search query and multiple search results. The search results each satisfy the search query and have a respective search result quality score. The search results include generic and mobile search results. The generic and mobile search results each identify a generic and mobile resource, respectively. The search result quality scores include mobile and generic search result quality scores for the mobile and generic search results, respectively. The mobile search result quality scores and the generic search result quality scores were generated according to different scoring formulas. Based on one or more terms in the search query, the search query is classified as a mobile query. As a consequence, one or more search result quality scores are modified to improve the sorting of search results that include both mobile and generic search results.

Abstract: Described is a technology by which a term frequency function for web click data is machine learned from raw click features extracted from a query log or the like and training data. Also described is using combining the term frequency function with other functions/click features to learn a relevance function for use in ranking document relevance to a query.

Abstract: The present invention provides for a computerized method and system for presenting geolocated relevance-based content including determining a geographic location of a mobile processing device and identifying a plurality of search queries associated with the geographic location of the mobile processing device. The computerized method and system further includes generating at least one search result responsive to at least one of the plurality of queries associated with the geographic location of the mobile processing device. Therefore, in the method and system, the mobile processing device is presented with one or more search results based on the geographic location of the mobile processing device.

Abstract: An initial ranked list of a first plurality of visual documents is obtained from a first source in response to a query, and a second plurality of visual documents relevant to the query is gathered from a plurality of second sources. Visual patterns identified from the second plurality of visual documents are compared with the first visual documents for reranking the first visual documents.

Abstract: A search engine may perform a search for a user search query. Result items may be returned as a result of the search. The user may enter new human edited information for some of the result items. The new human edited information may be displayed when other users search and view some of the result items at a later time.

Abstract: A computer implemented method of operating a navigation system to provide geographic location information is provided. The method comprises receiving a query text string representing a query for a geographic location from a user and obtaining data records that represent a plurality of candidate geographic locations. The method computes a text matching score that indicates how much of the query text string matches a record text string of the candidate geographic location and applies a usage pattern weight to the text matching score to obtain an overall score value for the candidate geographic location. The candidate geographic locations are ranked based on the overall score values.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for searching microblog entries. The microblog entries may be generated through a single microblog website or across multiple microblog sites. Upon receiving a search input, a series of microblog entries responsive to the search input may be displayed to the user. The displayed microblog entries may be the most recently generated microblog entries that are responsive to the search input. In another embodiment, the microblog entries returned are a best match to the search criteria, which may be based on a user authority score for a user that drafted a microblog entry and additional characteristics of the microblog entry.

Abstract: A method of extracting publications relevant to a reference entity, comprising the steps of generating an initial set of publications; associating the initial set with a database to generate a user-engageable display of at least one element relating to the at least one publication such that the at least one element is a required characteristic of the at least one publication in accordance with a predetermined standard of analysis; selecting at least a first element from the at least one element that represents a characteristic not present in the reference entity; yielding a result including publications in the initial set and excluding publications relating to the selected at least a first element in accordance with the predetermined standard of analysis.

Abstract: Articles such as compact discs are traded among a plurality of members who are registered in a common community. Each member has an account including a trading credit balance and a mailing address. A user interface is provided that allows a member to enter articles that the member owns and is willing to trade and articles that the member wants to own. The user interface also receives article trading instruction messages. An administration computer hosts the plurality of members and facilitates article trades among the members. The administration computer identifies matches between owned and wanted articles. For each identified match, an article trading instruction message is sent to the article owner requesting that the article owner mail the owned article to the mailing address of the member who wants to own the article.

Abstract: A method is disclosed wherein the webpages listed in the result set of a search engine is sorted according to the relevance of the webpages to a list of prioritised search terms. Search terms which are phrases that are delimited by prepositions are considered search terms with high priority. Search terms which nouns are set to high priority. Search terms which are adjectives, verbs, auxiliary verbs, articles, conjunctions, pronouns and prepositions are set to low priority.

Abstract: Systems and methods are described that select an outfit for a user from a database that stores a plurality of predefined outfits. A first interface can be used to obtain instructions from a user including at least a body shape and an event type. Using the instructions, a computer-based selector can select at least one predefined outfit that has at least two pieces, and the at least one predefined outfit can be displayed to the user via a second interface. Physical transfer of the at least one predefined outfit, or a portion thereof, can be facilitated by the systems and methods described herein.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for performing a search. A system configured to practice the method first receives from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system a word lattice based on speech query and receives indexed documents from an information repository. The system composes, based on the word lattice and the indexed documents, at least one triple including a query word, selected indexed document, and weight. The system generates an N-best path through the word lattice based on the at least one triple and re-ranks ASR output based on the N-best path. The system aggregates each weight across the query words to generate N-best listings and returns search results to the speech query based on the re-ranked ASR output and the N-best listings. The lattice can be a confusion network, the arc density of which can be adjusted for a desired performance level.

Abstract: A query may be received at a computing device through a network. One or more attribute values that are preferences for a subset of the one or more terms of the query may be identified by the computing device. One or more products or services having associated attributes that have values that match a subset of the identified attribute values may be identified by the computing device, and a subset of the identified products or services may be presented by the computing device through the network. Implementations may also identify latent preferences, that is, preferences that are found for a query even where such a preference is not explicitly part of a term or token of the query.

Abstract: An embodiment of the invention includes a method for searching for mobile assets (e.g., mobile telephone applications and/or web applications) based on popularity. The popularities of the mobile assets are determined by monitoring usage of the assets, e.g., downloading of assets and/or launching of assets. Popularities of the mobile assets are also determined by gathering and analyzing user feedback of the assets, e.g., user tags and/or user quality ratings. Search queries for assets are also monitored to determine asset popularity. A search query for a requested asset is received from a requesting mobile device. Results of the search query are weighed with the popularities of the assets; and, the results of the search query are sent to the requesting mobile device. The results of the search query are also sent to an interface. A repository of assets are created based on the popularities of the assets.

Abstract: An embodiment of the invention includes a method for searching for mobile assets in accordance with location. A monitoring module monitors usage of assets in a plurality of mobile devices to identify assets used in different locations. For each usage of an asset, the monitoring module identifies the location of the mobile device utilizing the asset via a global positioning system. A search query for a requested asset is received from a requesting mobile device. The location of the requesting mobile device is identified. Assets that are used in the location of the requesting mobile device are identified based on the monitoring of the usage of assets. Results of the search query are weighed by assigning higher rankings to the assets used in the location of the requesting mobile device. The results of the search query are sent to the requesting mobile device and/or an interface.

Abstract: A computer implemented method, computer-readable medium and system for deciding which external corpora, such as verticals, to integrate into primary Internet search engine results in response to a query is disclosed. Offline query-related data and user feedback data is incorporated. A probabilistic estimate is formed of the relevance of the verticals to the query.

Abstract: A recommendatory information provision system has a management apparatus and a user terminal device. The management apparatus includes a browsed information acquisition unit for acquiring information of a browsed document, a recommended document retrieval unit for retrieving a recommended document relevant to the browsed document, a recommendation history management unit for storing and managing history information which concerns recommendations of the recommended document, a recommendation history retrieval unit for retrieving from the recommendation history management unit, the history information of the recommended document which has been retrieved by the recommended document retrieval unit, and a recommendatory information provision unit for providing, to the user terminal device, the information concerning the recommended document and the history information of the recommended document as have been retrieved. The user terminal device has a display process unit for displaying the information on a screen.

Abstract: The present disclosure provides a computer-implemented method of processing Web activity data. The method includes obtaining a collection of Web activity data generated by a plurality of users at a plurality of Webpages, wherein the Webpages are from a plurality of unaffiliated Websites. The method also includes extracting a plurality of search terms from the Web activity data and associating each of the plurality of search terms with a corresponding Webpage. The method also includes generating statistical data from the Web activity data based, at least in part, on the search terms, the statistical data corresponding to the online activity at one or more Webpages.

Abstract: A method and system are provided for web search customization and web site rating. The system receives user input web sites, stores the web sites in a database, and groups them into user-specified categories. The system further allows users to select one or more web sites for customizing web search and querying the preselected sites using user input keywords. The system further provides the users with options to query a plurality of search engines. All web sites stored within the system are rated in response to the user operations. Each web site has at least a global rating indicating the rating within the system, a category rating indicating the rating within a given category, and a keyword rating indicating the rating for a given keyword. The system provides the users with a list of recommended web sites based on the web sites' ratings.

Abstract: A system for automating comparisons and ratings of new product models and services that is timely, efficient, objective and consistent where an expert system extracts model information from a plurality of web page and compares and rates each model against comparable competing models gathered from one or more web sites and stored in a database to be displayed when requested by a user.

Abstract: A method described herein includes receiving a query that is configured by an issuer of the query to be utilized to retrieve a portion of local search content, wherein the local search content comprises a first dataset and a second data set, wherein the first dataset comprises a first entity and the second dataset comprises a second entity, and wherein the query comprises a first token and a second token. The method also includes parsing the query such that the first token of the query is mapped to the first entity in the first dataset and the second token of the query is mapped to the second entity in the second dataset. The method also includes returning search results based at least in part upon the parsing of the query.

Abstract: A targeted advertising system performs context-based association mining using a publicly available corpus to identify a product or brand name that, under a given context, is associated with a product or brand being marketed. The system analyzes documents within the publicly available corpus that are associated with the given context, and identifies products or brand names that have a high association to the product or brand being marketed. The system can also analyze the publicly available corpus to determine contextual information which is correlated to two or more products or brand names. This contextual information includes a set of terms that facilitates filtering the publicly available corpus into an optimal set of documents that has a high association to a desired market category or demographic.

Abstract: One embodiment provides a system for recommending products. The system may include a search engine to retrieve, from a collection of product reviews, product review results using at least two input product names. The system may also include a template builder to build comparative sentence templates to define relationships between at least two product names, in which each comparative sentence template has a weight as a function of the defined relationship, and the search engine extracts one or more snippets matching at least one of the comparative sentence templates within each product review result. The system may further include a review ranking device to rank the product review search results based on the one or more extracted snippets, in which each snippet has a same weight as its matched comparative sentence template.

Abstract: Recommended Web sites are presented in response to a user visit to a Web site, a history of previous user visits to Web sites, or a user-initiated search query. The Web sites that are recommended are those deemed most similar to the subject Web site or to the results of the search query, as appropriate. Information regarding Web sites is retrieved from locations within a distributed system as identified by a distributed hash table and similarity assessments between the subject Web site or query responses and those Web pages may be made according to that information, as periodically updated.

Abstract: A system that incorporates teachings of the present disclosure may include, for example network device having a controller to receive multiple streams of content for portions of a multimedia work (MMW), perform a high level analysis for features in each of the streams for the MMW, perform a specialized analysis on the portion having a detected general feature to generate a content analysis output, correlate the content analysis output with other content analysis of the MMW, and output a weighted content description based on the correlation function. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Abstract: Techniques for searching and providing geographical regions are described. The process searches and recommends points of interests based on a user-specified region. Points of interests include spatial objects (e.g., buildings, landmarks, rivers, parks) and their distributions in a geographical region. The process searches and recommends points of interests by partitioning a spatial map into grids to identify representative categories located in each of the grids. In response to the user-specified region, a set of geographical candidates containing the representative categories is retrieved. The process determines whether the user-specified region and the set of geographical candidates include similar or common representative categories and similar or common spatial distributions of the representative categories. Then the process provides the top ranked set of geographical candidates that have similar content information.

Abstract: A method for identifying influential individuals in a customer arrivals list, including importing a customer arrivals list from a hospitality enterprise data source, wherein the arrivals list includes a plurality of entries, each entry corresponding to a customer and including at least a name of the customer, collecting profile information for the name in a designated entry in the arrivals list, from sources on the web, when the collecting profile information identifies one or more individuals who have the name in the designated entry: determining a level of certainty for at least one of the one or more identified individuals, that the identified individual be the same individual as the customer corresponding to the designated entry, based on data in the designated entry, determining a level of influence for the designated entry, based on the collected profile information; and assigning a hospitality venue selection influence metric (HVSIM) to the designated entry, based on the determining a level of certaint

Abstract: A tool, using an expressly programmed computer which is programmed with executable instructions, that utilizes data mined from web queries to populate a decision matrix for finding an outcome to a query. The decision matrix is a displayed spreadsheet having rows representing fields that are typical for the query. The web yields data that is extracted and stored in the fields for a plurality of such sites. Calculators or operator methods are used for displaying a desired outcome using the fields. The field data may be entered manually when not found on websites. Data may be changed from actual data to represent hypothetical situation or a data field may be deleted. Columnar data is operated upon to determine different outcomes for comparison.

Abstract: A metadata management system and method enables complex query searches by users, e.g., different users having different query needs, using the same infrastructure. For querying metadata, the metadata management system provides functionality for aggregating all the concepts (metadata items) and relationships of the metadata across one or more users in a common format; extracting concepts and storing them in a metadata store (e.g., a relational database); extracting relationships and modeling them in a standard semantic representation. The system and method further records users' different needs on relationships into user-specific configuration files. The system is configured for retrieving, in response to a user query, relevant data items by using the meta-data selectively.

Abstract: Described is the running of search-related experiments on a full (or partial) offline snapshot copy of the search engine documents of an actual production system. A snapshot experimentation subsystem runs experimental code related to web searches on the offline data, including to run experimental index building code to build an experimental index (e.g., to test a new document feature), and/or to run experimental search-related code, such as to rank search results according to experimental ranking code, to implement an experimental search strategy, and/or to generate experimental captions.

Abstract: A location extraction component analyzes a set of travelogues to identify all of the locations mentioned therein. A co-occurrence extraction component computes co-occurrence values for the identified locations. When the identity of a specified location is received, suggested locations for the specified location are identified through the use of the co-occurrence values. A map is displayed that encompasses an area including the specified location and the suggested locations. The map might include indicators for the specified location and for each of the suggested locations. Attributes of the indicators, such as their size or color, can be modified based upon the co-occurrence value associated with the corresponding suggested location.

Abstract: A system, method and computer program product for presenting Uniform Resource Locator (URL) search results in response to a user query. The method includes receiving inputs from a plurality of users, each input from a respective user representing a path traversal of web pages identified by that user as having a relevance as determined by that user from a list of search result URLs generated by a search engine in response to a query. The system generates, from the received user inputs, a traversal result comprising a super directed graph, or a sub-directed graph constructed from the super directed graph, of web page nodes representing the URLs interconnected by edges, the super directed graph configured to include those URLs based on a popularity measure of the pages traversed; and the traversal result is displayed to include the URLs for user selection, in response to a subsequent user query.

Abstract: A method of determining which users are experts and which tags are appropriate without some of the disadvantages of the prior art is described. The level of a user's expertise is determined based on previous tags, the categorization of one or more tags, and the rating of the tags previously left by the user. The appropriateness of a tag is based on previous tagging of information by the user, by the number of times a user has tagged information with the same categorization, and the rating of a user.

Abstract: A search engine stores different taxonomies that each specifies categories and relationships between the categories. When the search engine receives a request having a search query, the search engine determines which taxonomy, if any, it should use to generate a search engine results page. The search engine bases this determination upon information provided to it in the request, in one embodiment. For example, the search engine might select a taxonomy based on the particular environment from which the search query originated. However, the search engine can select the taxonomy based on other information, such as a role of the user. Thus, a medical researcher and a financial analyst for a particular corporation could receive search engine results pages that were generated with appropriate taxonomies for each of them.

Abstract: An improved system and method for updating search advertisements during search results navigation is provided. A search server may return search results from a search query with executable instructions that monitor events selecting a web page in the search results. When a web page may be selected in the search results on the client, a request that includes an address of a web page selected from the search results may be sent from the client to an advertiser server to update sponsored advertisements displayed in a sponsored advertisement area of the search results web page. The advertisement server may select an update of sponsored advertisements using query features, user features and web page features of the web page selected from the search results web page. The update may be sent to the client for display in the sponsored advertisement area of the search results web page.

Abstract: An apparatus and method facilitate combined query based searching with serendipitous browsing in a multimedia collection. A user selects objects to label from a local map, which may include representations of objects retrieved from the collection as being responsive to a text or image base query. The text and image portions of the object can be independently labeled. Unlabeled objects are scored and ranked based on the applied labels of labeled objects, which may take into account cross-media pseudo-relevance and user selectable (or default) parameters, such as a forgetting factor, which tends to place greater weight on more recently labeled objects, and a modality parameter, which laces greater weight on the modality (text, image, or hybrid) currently selected by the user. The local map is modified, based on the ranking, optionally after reranking of objects to improve the diversity of the displayed objects.

Abstract: A method, system and computer readable medium selects additional message content to display to a user when the user request base content. In order to optimize the intermediate selection pool of message candidates (from which a final selection is chosen), for each candidate message, a historical aggregate of CTR data is combined with an offline estimate, also obtained from historical data, of RElative Probability of Action (REPA, which combines computed relevancy scores and ranking information) and with bid amount to obtain an estimate for revenue generation. This estimate is combined with dynamic matching between the message and the page/user pair to obtain a final score for each message that is used to create the intermediate selection pool of message for the page displayed. Final message selection uses a feedback loop, using specific CRT in conjunction with the specific page displayed, for the messages in the intermediately selected pool.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for personalizing web sites. A model based on mining web usage data is accessed. The model defines associations between web sites. Interest associations extracted from web interactions are stored. The interest associations comprise interest indications and web sites associated with the interest indications. An interest indication from the interest associations is selected. The interest indication is associated with an associated web site. The associated web site has an association with a target web site as defined by the model. The interest indication is sent to the target web site.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer program products are provided for personalizing web sites. A model based on mining web usage data is accessed. The model defines associations between web sites. Interest associations extracted from web interactions are stored. The interest associations comprise interest indications and web sites associated with the interest indications. An interest indication from the interest associations is selected. The interest indication is associated with an associated web site. The associated web site has an association with a target web site as defined by the model. The interest indication is sent to the target web site.

Abstract: An improved system and method for predicting user navigation within sponsored search advertisements is provided. A list of sponsored advertisements for display on a web page of search results may be received. A click prediction classifier may be applied to predict a click probability of each sponsored advertisement and a dwell time prediction classifier may be applied to predict a dwell time probability on web pages of a website of each sponsored advertisement. A probability of user navigation may be predicted for each sponsored advertisement using a probability of a click on each sponsored advertisement and a probability of a dwell time on web pages of a website of each sponsored advertisement. The list of the sponsored advertisements may be ranked in part by the probability of user navigation and served to a web browser executing on a client device for display on a web page of search results.

Abstract: User insights derived from communication data may be provided. Communications associated with a user may be collected and analyzed to derive insights about the user. The insight may then be provided to the user, such as for modifying an application functionality, creating a message processing rule, providing new information to the user, and updating an application display or user interface.

Abstract: Methods, apparatus, and computer-readable media are described for accessing information related to a request in addition to the requested information. A query is submitted from a user device that requests specific information from a database. The query is executed to access a database snippet which includes the specific information and additional information related to the query. A hierarchical data object is formed from the accessed database snippet. Metadata tags are added to create a tagged hierarchical data object and the tagged hierarchical data object is sent to the user device, wherein the hierarchical data object may be accessed and displayed independent of the display size of the user device, and without a requirement to develop display forms needed with conventional solutions.

Abstract: In an embodiment, a computer-readable medium embodies instructions that, when executed by at least one processor, cause a computing system to perform operations including automatically defining one or more associations between a trademark record and a patent document and storing the one or more associations as mappings between trademarks and patent documents.

Abstract: Described is answering online web queries from a structured data store, such as a products database. An online web search query is modified into an evaluation expression for accessing a structured data store (e.g., a database, XML file, a flat table) to find search results. A query is matched to a pattern, which is used to generate the expression, as well as determine to which structured data store the query is routed. Tokens (e.g., words) in the query are processed against a dictionary of token classes (sets of tokens) and patterns (sets of token classes) to annotate the query to map the query to the matching pattern. A translation process generates the expression based on translation hints that correspond to the matching pattern. Also described is offline mining of query logs to generate the dictionaries.

Abstract: A computer-implemented method for managing video contents includes collecting a plurality of keywords related to a topic, the keywords being collected using at least one dynamic data source. One or more sub-topics of the topic are identified using the keywords collected. A topic node in a taxonomy of topics is built, the topic node including a topic identifier for the topic, a child topic identifier for the sub-topics identified, and a keyword section for one or more of the keywords collected. A plurality of videos is organized using the topic node built to assist a user in locating a video of interest.

Abstract: Review and filtering of search results is facilitated by providing additional types of results beyond links to existing documents can be provided in addition to or in place of links to existing documents. These additional results can facilitate modifying a search request to filter out unwanted documents. The additional results, when in the form of content display objects and/or application display objects, can also provide the user with varying levels of information detail. In some preferred embodiments, an ontology based knowledge base can be leveraged in order to facilitate providing and filtering the results.

Abstract: An example of a method includes generating an attributed extensible markup language path (XPath) for an annotated entity in a web page. The method further includes determining a first node that satisfy the attributed XPath in the web page and is annotated. The method also includes identifying an attribute property that satisfies predefined criteria in the web page while traversing from the first node to a root node, the attribute property comprising an attribute value and an attribute name. Moreover, the method includes populating the attributed XPath with the attribute property that satisfies predefined criteria. The method also includes filtering the attributed XPath to generate a robust XPath, and extracting content from multiple web pages based on the robust XPath.

Abstract: Computer-implemented methods and systems for searching network information through the use of user identification information, user preference information, and search topic information embedded in predetermined web sites. At least one of the user identification information and the user preference information may be collected from the user through the use of a questionnaire, encrypted, and stored under a user profile. Search information may be received from the user, encrypted, and utilized in performance of the network search by matching at least a portion of the encrypted search information with encrypted search topic information located in the predetermined web sites. The search may include matching at least a portion of the encrypted user identification information and/or the encrypted preference information with the encrypted search topic information located in the predetermined web sites.

Abstract: An exemplary embodiment of the present invention provides a method of receiving Website content. The method includes generating a user profile comprising a cluster type obtained from a list of cluster types, wherein the list of cluster types is generated by processing a database of search queries. The method includes providing the relevant cluster types included in the user profile to a selected Website, wherein the cluster type sent to the Website is used by the Website at least in part to determine the content provided by the Website.