Sony Corporation

Jesse Gallup

Michael Nientse Chang

The ability to search for content such as documents and other resources is enhanced through the use of two external sources of information. Each of the external sources may provide information (e.g., metadata) that may be employed as searchable tags that may be used by a search engine to locate the resources. A first level of tags may be obtained in a variety of different ways. For example, information extracted from a resource may be sent to a metadata service provider which can provide suitable metadata associated with the resource. This metadata, which may serve as the first level of tags, may be subsequently sent to a second metadata service provider to obtain additional metadata that may serve as the second level of tags.

Tagging of documents and other resources to enhance their searchability

Search results are prioritized based on the size of the content sources from which the search results were obtained. Such content sources may include, for instance, a user's local sources (e.g., a hard drive associated with a user's computer), a user's online content sources (e.g. a user's cloud storage), and the entire web. Search results which are obtained from smaller content sources (i.e., those containing fewer resources) are presented to the user before search results which are obtained from larger content sources (i.e., those containing a greater number of resources).

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San Marcos, CA, United States of America

Jesse Gallup