Been having a great time at the New York SES the last couple of days, with a chance to hang out with some friends I met at last year’s Search Engine Strategies and an opportunity to meet some new people.
I’ll probably write more about the conference in a few days. I need some sleep after the past few days of catching up and staying out a little late. I crashed early tonight, only to be awoken by the sound of a fire alarm. A voice over a loudspeaker came on a few minutes later and informed us that it was a false alarm.
Since I’m awake, and it may take a few minutes for the adrenalin rush to subside, I decided to post links to a couple of patents that were granted to Yahoo! yesterday, and a patent application from a couple of weeks ago with the name Apostolos Gerasoulis, of Ask (it’s hard not to write “Jeeves”), listed amongst its inventors.
Just a link to the documents and copies of the abstract tonight.
First, the patent application from Dr. Gerasoulis, Wei Wang, and Hyun-Ju Seo published February 16, 2006:
Retrieval and display of data objects using a cross-group ranking metric
Abstract:
Techniques to assign a ranking value to objects in a database, such as a collection of cross-referencing documents, the World-Wide Web, or a hyperlinked database, are described. The ranking value assigned to a given data object represents a cross-cluster strength metric. It is a function of the object’s importance across all groups or clusters in which the object is classified. The cross-cluster strength metric may be particularly beneficial in enhancing the performance of web-based search engines because it emphasizes the importance of objects that appear in multiple groups while de-emphasizing the importance of objects that, while highly linked within one or a few groups, are relatively unlinked to objects in other groups.
And, the two patents granted to Yahoo! on February 28, 2006:
Canonicalization of terms in a keyword-based presentation system
Abstract:
A presentation system accepts presentations or references to presentations from prospective presenters, some or all of which are stored in a database and referenced by keywords such that presentations to be presented in response to particular searches can be identified. A presentation manager handles accepting bids and settling terms between prospective presenters. The results of such processes might be stored in a presentation details database, and a presentation server handles retrieving presentations from there for presentation to users along with requests. Both the presentation manager and the presentation server can operate on a keywords-basis, wherein presentation terms specify keywords associated with particular presentations. The presentation server serves particular presentations based on keywords in a search query for which the presentations are to be returned. The association of keywords can be done using canonicalization so that, under certain conditions, different keywords are treated as the same keyword.
Targeted advertisements using time-dependent key search terms
Abstract:
An advertisement generation system presents a time-dependent advertisement to a user based upon a search term of a search query during a period of time via a communication network. The system includes a search engine coupled to a web server to receive the search query and present a search results page. An immediate advertisement accompanies the search results page. In one embodiment, the system includes an advertisement repository to store data representing a plurality of advertisements and includes the immediate advertisement and the time-dependent advertisement. Also, the system includes a user profiler configured to communicate a plurality of search characteristics and includes a data structure to store the search characteristics. Lastly, an advertisement server is included to provide to the web server the immediate advertisement with an associated search results page and the time-dependent advertisement with a web page presented after the display of the search results page until a period of time expires.
Ok. Spending some time reading through those has slowed down my heart rate slightly, and the adrenal rush is definitely over.
Howdee Bill!
Glad to hear things are going well at the conference. We are looking forward to getting the full scoop upon your return.
Hi Larry. So far, so fun. Thanks.