Whenever someone searches at a search engine, they not only get information in response to their search, but they also provide information to the search engine about the things they are searching for – information which the search engine might find useful in helping other searchers.
If that searcher performs another search related to their first search, then the search engine might create an association between the two search phrases that the searcher used, if the two phrases appear to be related. If they perform a series, or sequence, of searches on a concept, then the search engine might take advantage of that information.
If a lot of people perform that first search, and then the same second search, or that same search within a search session, then the search engine might decide that the phrases are semantically related to each other. Knowing that relationship exists between search queries might help the search engine help people find things on the web, and it might help provide better advertisements from the search engine.
A patent application from Yahoo explores how the search engine might find semantically related terms by looking at queries searched for by people in search sessions, and describes some of the processes behind how the search engine might determine that phrases may be related to each other. It also describes how a search engine might identify whether a query comes from a person, or from a program.
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