Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
2000-01-14
2003-04-08
Vu, Kim (Department: 2172)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06546388
ABSTRACT:
CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
Not applicable
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to field of Internet Search Engines, Web browsers, and resource gathering and has special application in situations where these functions must be implemented in extremely large networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
The World-Wide-Web (“Web”) has become immensely popular largely because of the ease of finding information and the user-friendliness of today's browsers. A feature known as hypertext allows a user to access information from one Web page to another by simply pointing (using a pointing device such as a mouse) at the hypertext and clicking. Another feature that makes the Web attractive is having the ability to process the information (or content) in remote Web pages without the requirement of having a specialized application program for each kind of content accessed. Thus, the same content is viewed across different platforms. Browser technology has evolved to enable the running of applications that manipulate this content across platforms.
The Web relies on an application protocol called HTML (Hyper-Text Mark Up Language), which is an interpretative scripting language, for rendering text, graphics, images, audio, real-time video, and other types of content on a Web compliant browser. HTML is independent of client operating systems. Therefore, HTML renders the same content across a wide variety of software and hardware operating platforms. The software platforms include without limitation Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Apple's Copeland and Macintosh, and IBM's AIX and OS/2, and HP Unix. Popular compliant Web-Browsers include without limitation Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Lynx, and Mosaic. The browser interprets links to files, images, sound clips, and other types of content through the use of hypertext links.
A Web site is a related collection of Web files that includes a beginning file called a home page. A Web site is located a specific URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Web site usually start with a home page from which a user can link to other pages. Online URL http://www.ibm.com is one example of a home page.
Users of the Web use tools to help find, location or navigate through the Web. These tools are known as Internet search engines or simply search engines. Almost all search engines provide graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for boolean and other advanced search techniques from their private catalog or database of Web sites. The technology used to build the catalog changes from site to site. The use of search engines for keyword searches over an indexed list of documents is a popular solution to the problem of finding a small set of relevant documents in a large, diverse corpus. On the Internet, for example, most search engines provide a keyword search interface to enable their users to quickly scan the vast array of known documents on the Web for the handful of documents which are most relevant to the user's interest.
There are several examples of search engines including tools called Internet search engines or simple search engines Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com), AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com), HotBot (www.hotbot.com), Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com), Lycos (http://www.lycos.com) WebCrawler (www.webcrawler.com) and others. The results of a search are displayed to a user in a hierarchically-structured subject directory. Some search engines give special weighting to words or keywords: (I) in the title; (ii) in subject descriptions; (iii) listed in HTML META tags, (iv) in the position first on a page; and (iv) by counting the number of occurrences or recurrences (up to a limit) of a word on a page. Because each of the search engines uses a somewhat different indexing and retrieval scheme, which is likely to be treated as proprietary information. Refer to online URL http://www.whatis.com for more information on search engines.
In its simplest form, the input to keyword searches in a search engine is a string of text that represents all the keywords separated by spaces. When the “search” button is selected by the user, the search enginefinds all the documents which match all the keywords and returns the total number that match, along with brief summaries of a few such documents. There are variations on this theme that allow for more complex boolean search expressions.
The problem present with the prior art is the inherent difficulty for web crawlers to adequately search, process, rank, and sort the vast amounts of information available on the Internet. This information content is increasing at an exponential rate, making traditional search engines inadequate when performing many types of searches.
At least one metadata search system (“Direct Hit” www.directhit.com) determines the most popular and relevant sites for a given Internet search request based on the number of direct hits that the site receives. However, these systems simply sort the results of the search based on the hits to those results (their hit count is simply a raw hit count—not associated with the original search query). Accordingly, a need exists to provide a system and a method to associate search results with a specific search query string.
As stated previously, with the volume of data available on the Internet increasing at an exponential rate, the search effort required to obtain meaningful results on the Internet is also increasing exponentially, thus triggering a need for more efficient search methodologies. Accordingly, a need exists to provide a system and method to permit improvement in the search ranking efficiency of current web search engines.
General Advantages
The present invention typically provides the following benefits:
Time Savings. Reading through the abstracts of a result page is a time consuming task. The sorting mechanism of the present invention brings the most popular resources for a particular query to the top of the list of the result page. Because users usually start from the beginning of a list, they save time reading abstracts. The popular ones might already be the best fit for their query and they can stop evaluating and reading more abstracts of the result page.
Leveraging Human Interaction. The resources are usually sorted by relevance (matching the original query string). Indexing is done mostly automatically. The present invention uses the human's ability to evaluate resources and store this information for further reuse. Users choose to access result items (by clicking on a hyperlink usually) after they evaluated the abstract of a result item and think that this could be a good match (for the query they issued before). This human knowledge is automatically collected and can then be reused by other users. Therefore, resources that are more often reviewed and visited will have a higher ranking. Thus, the search quality is improved by integrating human evaluation capabilities.
One skilled in the art will realize that these advantages may be present in some embodiments and not in others, as well as noting that other advantages may exist in the present invention that are not specifically listed above.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Briefly, in accordance with the present invention, a method for presenting to an end-user the intermediate matching search results of a keyword search in an index list of information. The method comprising the steps of: coupling to a search engine a graphical user interface for accepting keyword search terms for searching an indexed list of information with a search engine; receiving one or more keyword search terms with one or more separation characters separating th
Edlund Stefan B.
Emens Michael L.
Kraft Reiner
Myllymaki Jussi
Teng Shanghua
Fleit Kain Gibbons Gutman & Bongini P.L.
Gibbons Jon A.
International Business Machines - Corporation
Truong Cam-Y T
Vu Kim
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