Patent ID: 7158966
Filing Date: 2007-01-02
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A system that facilitates determining an intent of a user, comprising: a search component that identifies a result set for a user search query; a data store that maintains objects, the data store correlates the objects with queries that were previously employed to retrieve the objects; a user intent discovery component that determines a set of potential search areas based at least in part upon the result set of the user search query and results of previous queries; a query relation calculator that determines a level of relatedness between the user search query and the previous queries, the query relation calculator selects previous queries to display to the user based at least in part upon the calculated level of relatedness; wherein a level of relation between the previous queries and the user search query is obtained at least in part by determining distance metrics between the previous queries and the user search query; and wherein the distance metrics are determined by utilizing the algorithm  where ∥q,q′∥ is a distance metric between the user search query q and one or more previous queries q′, and R is a binary relation on Q×D, wherein Q is a set of queries previously employed by the search component and D is a set of objects within a data store that is searched over by the search component.