Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
2001-05-15
2004-10-26
Robinson, Greta (Department: 2177)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06810402
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention applies generally to computer-assisted searching, and more particularly to a method and computer program product for color coding search results as a convenience for interpreting search output that includes a large number of sources.
BACKGROUND
Internet users conduct searches to find pages on the World Wide Web that provide information about topics of interest. The topic of the search is specified by a set of keywords that the searcher enters on the input line of a web browser in response to prompts by the browser.
Some browsers permit searchers to enter not only keywords, but also requirements stated in Boolean logic that must be satisfied before a web page containing one or more of the keywords is judged to be relevant to the search. Nevertheless, having the option of using Boolean logic to specify conditions of the search is not always helpful, as many searchers find that working with Boolean logic is beyond their capabilities. Furthermore, details of the syntax for specifying Boolean logic often vary from browser to browser, and even a searcher who understands how to specify Boolean search criteria in principle maybe unable to do so in practice for a particular web browser at hand.
As a result, many searchers simply enter a few keywords on the browser's input line and proceed with the search. Browsers often interpret such entries as requests to find web pages that contain any one or more of the keywords—i.e., the default relationship among the keywords is logical union or “inclusive-or”—and therefore cast a wide net. Often, the search returns an unusably large number of sources, as a consequence of the very large number of web pages now accessible through the Internet.
To help manage the flood of information generated by an “inclusive-or” search, the search engine normally ranks the sources it finds according to its own rules, and presents the sources to the searcher as a list of web page links arranged from first to last according to the ranking. Unfortunately, the searcher is often unaware of the search engine's rules. So, lacking any better way to proceed, the searcher must often access and view numerous web pages before finding any truly relevant information.
For example, a searcher might enter three keywords, the words “alpha,” “beta,” and “gamma.”The search engine would then find sources that include the keyword “alpha” in isolation, sources that include the keyword “beta” in isolation, sources that include the keyword “gamma” in isolation, sources that include both the keywords “alpha” and “beta,” sources that include all three keywords, and so forth. It may be the searcher's intention, however, that at least two of the three keywords—or even that all three keywords—should appear before a source is judged to be relevant to the search.
Nevertheless, the search engine may first present links to sources that contain only the keyword “beta,” and only far down the list present links to sources that contain all three of the keywords. In other cases, the search engine might find only a single source that contains all three keywords, and put a link to this source at the top of the list. In the list, however, the first link might be followed by a large number of links to sources that are irrelevant according to the searcher's intentions, thereby requiring the searcher—who is unaware that these links are to web pages that contain only one or two of the keywords—to spend considerable time accessing and viewing irrelevant web pages.
More generally, with today's technology the searcher does not always have a clear picture of which keywords occur in which of the sources found in a basic “inclusive-or” search. So, from the searcher's point of view, the purpose of the search—to narrow the list of sources that must be examined in order to find relevant information—is effectively thwarted. As a result, the time spent on the search and the complexity of the search grow unproductively, because the searcher must often go back to the search engine with a new set of keywords or with an attempt to formulate stricter search criteria using Boolean logic.
Thus there is a need for a way of presenting the results of a search so that the searcher may form an effective picture of the relevance of the sources found by the search engine, in order that the searcher need not examine sources that lack relevant information yet appear nevertheless in the list of sources found by the search engine.
SUMMARY
The present invention enables a searcher to see at a glance how closely the sources found by a search engine match the keywords that convey the searcher's intended search criteria. In the case of an Internet search, the searcher's browser prompts the searcher to enter the keywords, for example on an input line presented on a display screen of a computer. The browser reads the keywords, associates colors with the keywords to provide a color code, and displays a color code map that explains the color code to the searcher in an intuitive way. The browser then sends the keywords over the Internet to a search engine.
The search engine executes a search, and sends to the browser a set of uniform resource locators (URLs) that identify web pages purportedly relevant to the search, along with occurrence data that report, for example, whether each keyword is present or absent in each web page, or how often each of the keywords occurs in each of the web pages, either in absolute terms or in terms relative to the occurrences of other keywords.
For each URL, the browser formulates a correlation indicator. The correlation indicator includes a visual area that is colored according to the color code and the occurrence data. The browser displays links to the URLs and the associated correlation indicators to the searcher.
For example, the searcher might enter the keywords “cricket,” “bat” and “Canada” on the input line. The browser might then associate the color blue with the word “cricket,” the color green with the word “bat,” and the color red with the word “Canada.” The browser might then display the color code map in the form of a horizontal bar that appears just below the input line, wherein the bar is colored so that the segment of the bar that appears beneath the word “cricket” is blue, the segment of the bar beneath the word “bat” is green, and the segment of the bar beneath the word “Canada” is red.
In this example, the correlation indicators might also be horizontal bars. For a URL that identified a web page that included the keyword “cricket” but neither “bat” nor “Canada,” perhaps a web page on insects, the entire correlation indicator bar could be colored blue. The all-blue bar would alert the searcher that the keyword “cricket” was found but not the other keywords. For a web page that included the words “cricket” and “bat” but not the keyword “Canada,” perhaps a web page on sports in England, the correlation indicator bar could be colored in part blue and in part green, but without the appearance of the color red. The part-blue-part-green-absent-red bar would alert the searcher that the keywords “cricket” and “bat” were found, but not the keyword “Canada.” For a web page that included all three keywords, perhaps a web page on sports in Canada, the correlation indicator bar could be colored in part blue, in part green, and in part red. For a web page that included the keyword “Canada” but neither “cricket” nor “bat,” the bar might be colored entirely red, and so forth.
In other embodiments of the invention, the correlation indicator may show the frequency of occurrence or the relative frequency of occurrence of each keyword in the web page identified by the URL, rather than show just the presence or absence of the keyword as described above. For example, if a web page contained the keyword “cricket” eight times and the keyword “bat” two times, eighty percent of the visual area of the correlation indicator could be blue and twenty percent green. In another embodiment, a visual area may be reserved in the correlation indicat
Bates Cary Lee
Santosuosso John Matthew
Sujjad Waheed
McGuireWoods LLP
Pivnichny John R.
Rayyan Susan
Robinson Greta
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