Patent ID: 7739273
Filing Date: 2010-06-15
Classification: G06F,H04M

Abstract:
1. A method for searching through a collection of standard text and active documents used in a product or system support environment, comprising: rendering one or more text based documents to comprise active content comprising a sequence of interactive questions and answers to solicit information from a user; storing the active content in a storage device comprising a repository; identifying answers to questions in the one or more text based documents, wherein the answers are identified in response to a user search query comprising a problem description; interactively prompting a user for answers to the questions and presenting the identified answers to the user in a graphical user interface, thereby bypassing questions in the one or more documents that are implicitly answered by analysis of the active content in response to the user search query and alleviating the need for the user to answer them; offering the user the ability to modify answers to questions erroneously presumed to be answered by the search query, wherein a rank of search query results is increased based on the degree to which a problem description or search query implicitly answers the questions; recording the user's interactions as a transcript; and copying the transcript into a system or application clipboard.