Sarnoff Corporation

Technology Inc. 64

Suz Hsi Wan

Brian Astle

Jeffrey Esakov

Dina Kravets

Liviu Chiriac

Allen Henry Simon

Stuart Jay Golin

John Michael Keith

A tool to be used with a search engine for a information management system includes methods for refining, filtering, and organizing search queries and search results. A query tuner in the tool allows a user to automatically reformulate a query in order to find a reasonable number of matching documents from the search engine by selectively modifying individual search terms to be weaker or stronger and concurrently requesting a plurality of searches, each with a respectively different modified query. The tool also uses a dynamic filter which employs a dynamic set of record tokens to restrict the results of an arbitrary search query to selectively include or exclude records which correspond to the set of record tokens. The tool also includes a results organizer which aids the user in understanding and visualizing a large number of matching documents returned in response to a search query by clustering like items returned from the search. The query tuner, dynamic filter and results organizer may be used individually or in conjunction. The searched information management system may be consolidated or distributed and may span a global information network such as the Internet.

Search data processor

Growing community of inventors

Princeton, NJ, United States of America

Suz Hsi Wan