Facility for highlighting documents accessed through search or browsing

Abstract

An Information highlighting facility assists the user in evaluating relevance of accessed documents to the user's information need. The accessed documents may, for example, be identified by a search engine in response to a user query. When accessing documents identified as relevant by a search engine from other networked computers, the facility provides information highlighting to assist the user in determining whether the document is relevant. A model of the user's interest, which may include an augmented set of search terms is used to take into account the general interest of the user as captured by an interest profile and context of use of the computer by the user, or a combination thereof. The model of the user's interest is applied to the document text as the document is accessed from its source. The highlighting of information about the document content may include highlighting of the terminology in the text, scrolling of the document to the relevant passages, identification of entity names and entity relations, creation of a document summary and a document thumbnail, etc. In addition, the model can be applied to a set of documents accessed by the user, e.g., to re-rank the top scoring documents from the result set provided to the user by a search engine or some other information providing services.