Inktomi Corporation

Yahoo! Inc.

Michael E Palmer

Andrew Littlefield

Matthew Charles Grogan Hall

Troy Richardson Toman

Hongyuan Zha

Gordon Sun

A method and apparatus are provided for determining when electronic documents stored in a large collection of documents are similar to one another. A plurality of similarity information is derived from the documents. The similarity information may be based on a variety of factors, including hyperlinks in the documents, text similarity, user click-through information, similarity in the titles of the documents or their location identifiers, and patterns of user viewing. The similarity information is fed to a combination function that synthesizes the various measures of similarity information into combined similarity information. Using the combined similarity information, an objective function is iteratively maximized in order to yield a generalized similarity value that expresses the similarity of particular pairs of documents. In an embodiment, the generalized similarity value is used to determine the proper category, among a taxonomy of categories in an index, cache or search system, into which certain documents belong.

Method and apparatus for measuring similarity among electronic documents

Techniques are provided for delivering search results pages to the users of a search engine, where one or more search result listings on the search results pages include items that are not included by default. The non-default items may take many forms, including but not limited to images, banners, controls, animations, and even Java applets. The non-default items may be designed to entice the search engine users to select the search result listing with which they are associated over possibly higher-ranked search result listings that contain only default items.

Delivering non-default items in association with search results

Growing community of inventors

San Francisco, CA, United States of America

Michael E Palmer