Methods and systems for providing a response to a query. Multiple users' search engine activity in regard to a query is correlated. A response is provided based upon this correlated search engine activity information. For one embodiment of the invention, in the context of search engine result optimization, the user activity and/or user information of multiple users, during a search session, is correlated with queries to effect an evolving association between queries and the organization and presentation of documents. Systems in accordance with such embodiments employ the ability to store users' activity over the entire search session, thus making possible the correlation of a number of different types of user activity and user information. The use of correlated user input allows such systems to provide relevant search results without the limitations imposed by the key-word-based systems of the prior art.
An enhanced natural language information retrieval technique tokenizes an incoming query, comparing the tokenized representation against a collection of query templates. Query templates include a first portion having one or more query patterns representative of a query and in a form suitable for matching the tokenized representation of an incoming query. Query templates also include one or more information retrieval commands that are designed to return information relevant to those query patterns in its first portion. The enhanced natural language information retrieval technique selects those query templates that are determined to be most relevant to the incoming query (via its tokenized representation) and initiates one or more information retrieval commands associated with the selected query templates.
Techniques to retrieve, rank and display data objects retrieved form a database are described. In particular, methods to assign a global ranking value to a data object based on a combination of that object's link-based (e.g., vector-space cluster analysis) and text-based (e.g., word frequency) ranks are described. Additional techniques to determine a set of concepts, topics or key words associated with each retrieved data objects are described.
Techniques to assign a ranking value to objects in a database such as a collection of cross referencing documents, the World-Wide Web or a hyperlinked database are described. The ranking value assigned to a given data object represents a cross-cluster strength metric and is a function of the object's importance across all groups or clusters in which the object is classified. The cross-cluster strength metric may be particularly beneficial in enhancing the performance of web-based search engines because it emphasizes the importance of objects that appear in multiple groups while de-emphasizing the importance of objects that, while highly linked within one or a few groups, are relatively unlinked to objects in other groups.
The generation a search query based on information stored on a storage medium is described. According to one embodiment of the invention, search criteria is entered to perform a search of a storage medium of a client computer. The search of the storage medium determines a web search criteria. The client computer provides search results based on the web search criteria.