Google Inc.

Other

Perspecta, Inc.

Damon M Horowitz

Robert Spiro

Max Ventilla

Sepandar D Kamvar

Nathan Stoll

Michael Kim

Lisa S Strausfeld

Earl F Rennison

William C MacCartney

Winton Henry Ellis Davies

David B Shefner

Joseph W Ruffles

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for a social search engine. In one aspect, a method includes receiving a question from an asker in which the question is associated with one or more topics; selecting candidate answerers based at least partly on each answerer's respective relationship to the asker; sending the question successively to groups of one or more candidate answerers according to the ranking until an answer is received from a particular one of the candidate answerers; and sending to the asker the received answer and information that identifies the particular answerer.

Social search engine

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs, for a social search engine. In one aspect, a method includes receiving an answer to a question from an answerer; identifying an entity in the answer, in which the entity refers to a product, a service, a company, or a merchant; obtaining permission from the answerer to provide an interactive link for the entity in the answer to a resource from which the entity can be obtained; receiving a user submitted query and determining that the query is related to the entity; and responsive to determining, providing the answer, including the link to the resource, as part of search results that are responsive to the query.

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for a social search engine. In one aspect, a method includes receiving an answer to a question from an answerer; identifying an entity in the answer, in which the entity refers to a product, a service, a company, or a merchant; obtaining permission from the answerer to provide an interactive link for the entity in the answer to a resource from which the entity can be obtained; receiving a user submitted query and determining that the query is related to the entity; and responsive to determining, providing the answer, including the link to the resource, as part of search results that are responsive to the query.

Affiliate linking where answerer requests permission to insert an interactive link in an answer

An information system and method provide organizational and navigational aids to a user to facilitate exploration and analysis of a document collection. The system includes a document collection containing a plurality of documents, and a knowledge base containing a plurality of topics. Each topic expresses an idea or concept, and is associated with a set of terms which describe the topic, a set of documents in the document collection which are about the topic. Each topic also has topic-subtopic relationships with selected other topics, forming local topic hierarchies. A query analysis module receives a current query and processes the query against the document collection to select a set of documents that satisfy the query. A dynamic content organization module processes the document set according to defined parameters and a user selection or automatic selection of a desired topic arrangement to create various types of topic arrangements. These topic arrangements include supertopics, subtopics, perspective topic, and theme topic arrangements. A supertopic arrangement is a set of parent topics of a topic derived from the query, which parent topics best generalize the document set. A subtopic arrangement is a set of subtopics of a topic derived from the query which best cover and partition the document set. A perspective topic arrangement has perspective topics, each of is a parent topic of a set of subtopics that cover and partition the document set. A theme topic arrangement has theme topics, each of which expresses a major subject or concept that describes the document set and distinguishes it from the rest of the document collection.

Dynamic content organization in information retrieval systems

An intuitive, immersive, movement-based interface and system provides for navigating through large collections of multidimensional information. The interface allows users to navigate through large document collections by maintaining a constant density of visual information presented on a display device to the user at any given moment of time. The document collection is organized in an immersive information space, containing various levels of topics and related documents. At each level within the immersive information space contextual information is presented to the user. The contextual information consists of a semantic scale and a pathway to the information they are viewing. An information structure represents the immersive information space of documents. The information structure consists of a collection of documents, and a graph of topics that describe the relationships between the documents. The graph of topics consists of topic nodes that each contain 1) a set of documents that are about that topic, and 2) a set of links to other topics in the structure. The links represent relationships between topics, and indirectly, relationships between the documents. An information structure that represents the collection of documents is used to guide the user to documents of interest and to show relationships between documents. A presentation and interaction model allows navigation through the information structure. The model includes a camera representing a user's focus of attention, and a set of reactable graphical objects representing nodes in the information structure. The interaction model continuously monitors the movement of the camera in relation to the graphical objects and updates the display of the information space.

Immersive movement-based interaction with large complex information

A system, method, and software product create contextual hypertext links relevant to a user selected portion of a source document. The contextual links enable the user to dynamically associate the source document with any available target document, regardless of whether links where created between the source document and the target document when the source document was created. The method includes selecting terms relevant to the user selected portion by linguistic analysis which selects the most frequently occurring terms. From the selected terms target documents relevant to the selected terms are identified. The target documents are selected by identifying topics that are associated with, or described by, the selected terms. Contextual links are created between the selected terms and target documents associated with the identified topics using the URLs for the documents in the contextual links. The system includes a knowledge base of topics, including hierarchical relations between topics, and associations of topics and terms. A document collection includes documents and references to documents, and URL or other addressing information for the documents. A tagging module receives a user selected portion and selects terms to be used for the contextual links. A presentation module identifies the topics in the knowledge base associated with the selected terms, the documents associated with each topic, and creates the hypertext links between the terms and the documents.

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San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Damon M Horowitz