Yahoo! Inc.

Excalibur Ip, LLC

Slack Technologies, Inc.

Kevin Lee

Qi Lu

Eckart Walther

David Ku

Ali Diab

Chung-Man Tam

Zhichen Xu

Jianchang Mao

Kenneth Norton

Nam Nguyen

Jason Brant Douglas

Scott A Gatz

Benjamin Garrett

Computer systems and methods incorporate user annotations (metadata) regarding various pages or sites, including annotations by a querying user and by members of a trust network defined for the querying user into search and browsing of a corpus such as the World Wide Web. A trust network is defined for each user, and annotations by any member of a first user's trust network are made visible to the first user during search and/or browsing of the corpus. Users can also limit searches to content annotated by members of their trust networks or by members of a community selected by the user.

Search system and methods with integration of user annotations from a trust network

Computer systems and methods allow users to annotate content items found in a corpus such as the World Wide Web Annotations, which can include any descriptive and/or evaluative metadata related to a document, are collected from a user and stored in association with that user. Users are able to annotate and view their annotations for any document they encounter while interacting with the corpus, including hits returned in a search of the corpus. Users are also able to search their annotations or to limit searches to documents they have annotated. Metadata from annotations can also be aggregated across users and aggregated metadata applied in generating search results.

Search systems and methods with integration of aggregate user annotations

Computer systems and methods allow users to annotate content items found in a corpus such as the World Wide Web. Annotations, which can include any descriptive and/or evaluative metadata related to a document, are collected from a user and stored in association with that user. Users are able to annotate and view their annotations for any document they encounter while interacting with the corpus, including hits returned in a search of the corpus. Users are also able to search their annotations or to limit searches to documents they have annotated. Metadata from annotations can also be aggregated across users and aggregated metadata applied in generating search results.

Search systems and methods with integration of user annotations

Inverse search systems and methods operate on identifiers of content items in a corpus such as the World Wide Web In an inverse search, the user submits a query that includes an identifier of a target content item in the corpus and receives information (metadata) about the target content item being returned to the user. Many types of metadata can be returned, including ratings or other metadata related to the target content item obtained from users, popularity data specific to the target content item, information about previously submitted forward search queries that led to the target content item being identified as a hit, and metadata extracted from the target content item.

Inverse search systems and methods

Personal portal pages for individual users are integrated with web content syndication. For example, when a search query is received from the user, a list of hits is generated. For each hit, it is determined whether there is an associated syndication feed, such as an RSS feed. The list of hits is displayed for the user, and a syndication option is included for each hit that has an associated syndication feed. The user can select the syndication option and thereby subscribe their personal portal page to that syndication feed. In some embodiments, the user may also be able to select syndication feeds for subscription via an alternative interface.

Integration of personalized portals with web content syndication

Systems and methods for collecting user annotations

Growing community of inventors

East Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Kevin Lee