Sunday, May 15, 2005

Yahoo Looks At Trends in New Patent Application

After logging into your "my Yahoo" portal, you decide to look for sites about music.

You perform a search for "popular music" in the Yahoo! search engine. If you're under 21, the search engine might return results about Avril Lavgne. If you're over 35, you might see results about Celine Dion instead.

That's one of the potential applications that may come to Yahoo! as a result of the technology described in Systems and methods for search query processing using trend analysis.

A few other recent Yahoo! patent application included the use of concepts gleaned from user queries to help build responses to future queries. This patent application adds an additional element, looking at trends involving

Time - including the times of day that things may be searched for, the changes in searches on weekdays as opposed to weekends, seasonal searches, and more.

Geography - Will people searching for the same terms in different locations expect different results? It's quite possible.

User demographics - Information about users of such services as "My Yahoo" may tell the search engine something about what users of different demographic groups might look for, and what they expect to see.

User history or context (referred to here as a "vertical" dimension) - Information from past searches might influence future results,
etc.

And yes, the Avril Lavgne and Celine Dion examples are part of the patent application.

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