Patent ID: 7725424
Filing Date: 2010-05-25
Classification: G06F,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A method for presenting banner advertisements to a user who is seeking information about products and/or services, comprising: (a) defining a collection C (b) for a plurality of the categories in the collection C (c) for a plurality of providers of products and/or services to be utilized, assigning the provider to one or more categories based upon the products and/or services offered by the provider, (d) assigning a plurality of the categories to supercategories, (e) for a plurality of the supercategories, associating one or more banner advertisements with the supercategory, (f) for a plurality of the supercategories, associating with the supercategory the sets of terms which describe the product(s) or service(s) associated with categories assigned to the supercategory, and the category identifier terms which are unique to categories assigned to the supercategory, (g) in response to a user query Q, comprising terms describing products and/or services of interest to the user, selecting categories, in the collection of categories C (h) preparing a new query Q′ comprising the terms in the user query Q, the descriptive terms for the products and/or services associated with the categories selected, and the unique category identifier terms associated with the categories selected, (i) applying the query Q′ to the collection of supercategories, (j) selecting the supercategory with the highest score, and (k) presenting to the user a banner advertisement associated with the supercategory selected.