Patent ID: 9323836
Filing Date: 2016-04-26
CPC Classification: G06F

Claim Text:
1. A computer system for computing the popularity of one or more artists, comprising: one or more client computers; at least two information servers, wherein each information server contains or provides data related to one or more artists, and wherein at least one information server is accessible through the Internet; a popularity profile server (PPS) comprising: one or more network interfaces connecting the popularity profile server, the one or more information servers, and the one or more client computers to a network; a centralized database for storing all of the data obtained and the scores calculated; a plurality of retrieval agents, each retrieval agent implementing computer instructions to obtain data from one of the at least two information servers in response to instructions communicated to the retrieval agent by an agent manager operating on the PPS, the data obtained comprising a subset of the data which is less than the whole of the data used to calculate a score, the instructions comprising a number N representing the maximum number of attempts to obtain the data for each task during a communications session, a number T representing a time period to wait, and an indicator of a portion of data available from the one of the at least two information servers that is different for each retrieval agent, the portion being less than the whole of the data available, wherein each retrieval agent does not attempt to obtain the data before the respective time period T has expired, wherein each retrieval agent obtains the data in accordance with the respective indicator, and wherein for each retrieval agent: a maintenance agent implementing computer instructions to, in response to new data being added to the centralized database by any of the at least two retrieval agents: update one or more indexes related to the centralized database used to facilitate retrieval of data stored therein and cause the scorekeeper to calculate the two or more sets of scores for artists associated with the new data; a widget agent implementing computer instructions on the PPS, to communicate with a remote third party application to receive a request from a remote third party application, the request comprising an identifier of an artist, wherein upon receiving the request, the widget agent retrieves from the centralized database the current ranking of the artist using the identifier and transmits the current ranking to the remote third party application, the current ranking representing the ranked order of the artist based on a comparison of the artist's current sets of scores to other artists' current sets of scores; wherein the agent manager records in a log file after each data retrieval attempt by the plurality of retrieval agents an indicator of whether the data retrieval attempt was successful or not successful; and wherein at least one of the plurality of retrieval agents obtains the data by extracting the data directly from the HTML code of a web page viewable by a web browser or by receiving the data from a third party application that extracts the data from the HTML code of a web page viewable by a web browser.