US 6,728,704 B2
METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MERGING RESULT LISTS FROM MULTIPLE SEARCH ENGINESGeneral
US 6,728,704 B2
METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR MERGING RESULT LISTS FROM MULTIPLE SEARCH ENGINES
Tech Center:
2100 Computer Architecture and Software
Examiner:
Safet Metjahic
Art Unit:
2171 Graphical User Interface and Document Processing
Agent:
Inventors:
Jianchang Mao; Rajat Mukherjee; Prabhakar Raghavan; Panayiotis Tsaparas
Assignee:
Priority:
08/27/01
Filed:
08/27/01
Granted:
04/27/04
Expiration:
03/27/22
Abstract
This invention includes the step of transmitting a query to a set of search engines. Any result lists returned from these search engines is received, and a subset of entries in each result list is selected. Each entry in this subset is assigned a scoring value according to a scoring function, and each result list is then assigned a representative value according to the scoring values assigned to its entries. A merged list of entries is produced based upon the representative value assigned to each result list.
Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC)
G06G06F16/9538G06FY10S707/99933Y10S