Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1999-08-31
2001-11-20
Alam, Hosain T. (Department: 2172)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C709S218000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06321228
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a computer search system and more particularly to a search system and method in a computer network for sharing and ranking retrieved preselected records that are organized in a hierarchical format.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Advances in computer processing power and network communications have made information from a wide variety sources available to users on computer networks. Computer networking allows network computer users to share information, software applications and hardware devices and internetworking enables a set of physical networks to be connected into a single network Such as the Internet. The World Wide Web (Web), a hypermedia system used on the Internet, enables hypertext linking, whereby documents automatically reference or link other documents located on connected computer networks around the world. Thus, users connected to the Internet have almost instant access to information stored in relatively distant regions.
A page of information on the Web may include references to other Web pages and may include a broad range of multimedia data including textual. graphical, audio. and animation information. Currently, Internet users retrieve information from the Internet, through the Web, by ‘visiting’ a web site on a computer that is connected to the Internet. The web site is, in general terms, a server application that displays information stored on a network server computer. The web site accepts connections from client programs, such as Internet browsers, and the client programs allow Internet users to access information displayed on the web site. As the number of physical networks connected to the Internet continue to grow, so too will the number of web sites that are accessible to Internet users.
Presently, the only practical way to search the Internet for web sites that are related to a specific topic is to use an Internet search program or engine, such as AltaVista™ or Yahoo™.
In order to use a search engine to search for web sites related to a specific topic, the Internet user submits a search query containing search terms to a software program on a network server computer. The software program executes the search program to retrieve web sites that are related to the specified topic and to store the retrieved web sites in a result set. Search programs typically search all accessible web sites and index and rank retrieved web sites. While search engines typically implement different search techniques for indexing and ranking retrieved web sites, a common technique is for the search engine to count the number of times a search term appears on a web site. Some search engines also consider how often the search term appears in the beginning of a document because documents with search terms in the beginning are more likely to be relevant to the search topic.
Based on the search topic and the number of retrieved web sites, the user may be required to scan through thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of records in the result set. Moreover, the user may be required to ‘click’ hyperlinks in each record and wait for the web site associated with the hyperlink to display its contents. It is only after the web site's contents are displayed and examined by the user that the user can determine if the web site is relevant to the information sought. Often, this can be a slow process and users may have to go to a lot of immaterial web sites in order to find relevant web sites. Additionally, the user has no way of determining if another user has performed a search on the same topic and no way of sharing already conducted search and research quickly and easily with other Internet users via an Internet search engine.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a system and method that enable Internet users to access selected records retrieved from result sets that are derived from earlier search queries. The invention tracks and ranks selected records that users deemed valuable to a search query. When an Internet user submits a search query, the system creates three distinct but related queries for searching all accessible web sites, a collection database and a rank database. The collection database includes a list of collections, i.e., records that other users deem relevant to a search topic and that are selected from result sets derived with earlier search queries; the collection is organized in a folder/file based hierarchical format. The rank database includes uniform Resource Locators (URLs) for identifying web sites that are bookmarked by other users. Each record in the collection and rank databases has an associated score that is used to organize records retrieved from those databases. Thus, when the user submits a search query to the system, it returns selected records from the collection and rank databases, in addition to other related web sites from the Internet.
Specifically, when a user performs a search on a precise topic, the user selects records consisting of URLs and/or other data, such as files and images, from the retrieved result set, and organizes the selected records in a collection. Collection records containing bookmarks of URLs may also come from other sources, such as web sites that are manually bookmarked by the user or bookmarks that are uploaded through a computer browser. The user may share the collection with other Internet users by designating it as a public collection and submitting it for approval. When a collection is approved, it is assigned a URL, several related keywords, and a description. It is then cleared to show up as a shared resource. Public collections are searchable by search engines and viewable by other users. Hence, other Internet users performing the same search may benefit from the research of the collection's creator. This system saves time in that other Internet users may not have to scan through unrelated records in a result set in order to locate pertinent web sites and/or information.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system that combines records retrieved from the three distinct queries into a result set and sorts the records in the result set. The system assigns separate scores to the three queries in order to sort records in the result set that were retrieved through the respective queries. The system also assigns separate scores to each record in the sorted result set to further determine the relevancy of each record to the search query. The system increases the score associated with each record each time a search term occurs in the record and based on the location of the search term in the record. The system may further sort the result set based on the user s sorting choice.
It is another object of the invention to use the first distinct query to locate records containing a phrase made up of all terms in the search query, but excluding a first special character or Boolean term. The system uses the second distinct query to locate records containing all terms in the search query and it uses the third distinct query to locate records containing any search term or variation of the search term.
It is another object of the invention to allow the user to bookmark web pages that contain relevant information, to store URL records corresponding to the bookmark web page in the rank database, and to track and rank the URL records based on the bookmarking activity on the associated web site.
It is another object of the invention to track and rank URL records associated with bookmarked web pages by assigning a score to each URL record and maintaining the assigned score. The system periodically recalculates scores assigned to each URL record in order to prevent the earliest created records from always having the highest scores. The system also utilizes fields in the URL record in a predefined formula in order to periodically recalculate the score associated with each record in the rank database.
It is a further object of the invention to maintain keywords for describing the bookmarked web page in the URL, record, assigning a sco
Bosarge Jason Wayne
Crandall Aaron Clyde
Hernandez Louis
Alam Hosain T.
Fliesler Dubb Meyer & Lovejoy LLP
PowerCast Media, Inc.
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