Patent ID: 7630976
Filing Date: 2009-12-08
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A computer-readable storage medium containing instructions for controlling a computer system to calculate relevance of a document to a user, by a method comprising: providing click-through data generated when users submitted queries to a search engine and selected a document from results provided by the search engine; identifying user, query, and document triplets from the click-through data, each triplet indicating that the user of the triplet submitted the query of the triplet and the user selected the document of the triplet from results of the query provided by the search engine; identifying user clusters of users and query clusters of queries such that each user is in only one user cluster and each query is in only one query receiving from a user a query; searching for documents to be provided as results of the received query; for each document of the results of the received query, determining a probability that the user from whom the query was received will find the document relevant by performing a smoothing of the identified triplets to account for sparseness of the triplets and calculating the probability based on the smoothed triplets, the smoothing including: displaying an indication of the documents to the user from whom the query was received in an order based on the combined overall probabilities of the documents.