Web Search: Endeca’s Guided Navigation Awarded Patent and More Published Patent Applications
It has been a couple of weeks since our last report. Here’s a look at one awarded patent and a bunch of just published patent applications.

Awarded Patent
Patent Awarded to Endeca
Hierarchical data-driven navigation system and method for information retrieval
Filed: May 18, 2000
From the abstract, “A data-driven, hierarchical information navigation system and method enable search of sets of documents or other materials by certain common attributes that characterize the materials. The invention includes several aspects of a data-driven, hierarchical navigation system that employs this navigation mode. The navigation system of the present invention includes features of an interface, a knowledge base and a taxonomy definition process and a classification process for generating the knowledge base, a graph-based navigable data structure and method for generating the data structure, World Wide Web-based applications of the system, and methods of implementing the system.” News Release
Note: Want To Demo Endeca Technology in a Library Environment? The library catalog at North Carolina State University is powered by Endeca. Read More.

Published Patent Applications
Vocabulary-independent search of spontaneous speech
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: November 29, 2004
Abstract: “A method of identifying a location of a query string in an audio signal is provided. Under the method, a segment of the audio signal is selected. A score for a query string in the segment of the audio signal is determined by determining the product of probabilities of overlapping sequences of tokens. The score is then used to decide if the segment of the audio signal is likely to contain the query string.”

Utilizing information redundancy to improve text searches
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: January 20, 2006
From the abstract: “Architecture for improving text searches using information redundancy. A search component is coupled with an analysis component to rerank documents returned in a search according to a redundancy values. Each returned document is used to develop a corresponding word probability distribution that is further used to rerank the returned documents according to the associated redundancy values. In another aspect thereof, the query component is coupled with a projection component to project answer redundancy from one document search to another. This includes obtaining the benefit of considerable answer redundancy from a second data source by projecting the success of the search of the second data source against a first data source.

Method of controlling an Internet browser interface and a controllable browser interface
Assignee: Yahoo
Filed: February 2, 2006

Internet search environment number system
Assignee: NA
From the abstract, “The present invention discloses an Internet search environment number (”ISEN”) system that provides researchers with a tool to locate and search relevant, evaluated online databases. The ISEN system is a portal that comprehensively catalogs the Internet’s databases thereby making information located on the Internet readily accessible from both visible and invisible database resources”
Filed: November 28, 2005

Title: System and method for property-based focus navigation in a user interface
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: November 19, 2004

Lexicon-based new idea detector
Assignee: NA
Filed: October 12, 2005

Lexicon-based new idea detector
Assignee: NA
Filed: October 12, 2005

Method for search result clustering
Assignee: NA
Filed: November 1, 2005

Search query processing to identify related search terms and to correct misspellings of search terms
Assignee: NA
Filed: January 6, 2006

Method and system for internet publishing and advertising forums
Assignee: NA
Filed: November 27, 2004

Method and system for ranking messages of discussion threads
Assignee: Microsoft
Filed: May 16, 2005
From the abstract, “The ranking system defines an equation for attributes of a message and an author. The equations define the attribute values and are based on relationships between the attribute and the attributes associated with the same type of object, and different types of objects.”

Method for gathering and summarizing internet information
Assignee: U.S. Government Funded Research, Office of Naval Research
Filed: November 3, 2005

System and methods for data analysis and trend prediction
Assignee: NEC Research
Filed: March 22, 2005

Methods and apparatus for assessing web page decay
Assignee: IBM
Filed: November 22, 2004
Note: Dr. Andrei Broder listed as an inventor now works at Yahoo Research.
From the abstract, “Systems and methods are herein disclosed for assessing the staleness of a web page. In particular, in one method of the present invention, the staleness of a web page is assessed by examining internal date references within the web page. In another method of the present invention, the staleness of a web page is assessed by examining the meta-data associated with the web page. In a further method of the present invention, the staleness of a hyperlinked web page is determined by examining the link status of the hyperlinks. If the web page has a relatively large number of dead links, it is assessed as being a stale web page. In a still further method of the present invention, the link status of web pages in the neighborhood of the web page being assessed is likewise examined.”

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