Patent ID: 7493273
Filing Date: 2009-02-17
Classification: G06Q

Abstract:
1. A method facilitating the identification of similar auctions, comprising: receiving a set of keywords relating to an auction; searching, based on the set of keywords, a database of auction objects each containing at least one word, to identify a first set of auction objects; identifying a model auction; for at least one auction object in the first set of auction objects, wherein the distinctiveness of a keyword in the set of keywords is determined by computing a value D, where and wherein M represents the first set of auctions; K represents the set of keywords; K E(M,K φ(X) is a function that returns the total number of elements in the set X, except the empty set; wherein the position weighting of a keyword in the set of keywords is determined by computing a value G, where and wherein W represents a description of an auction M N represents the total number of words in W, Position(W,K F(x) is a function where x ranges from 0 to 1, f(x) ranges from 0 to 1, and f(0)=1 and f(x) decays to 0 as x approaches 1; wherein the determining step further comprises computing, for the at least one auction, the difference between 1) the sum of the products of the distinctiveness and the position weightings for each keyword in the set of keywords, and 2) the sum of the products of the distinctiveness and the position weight for each word in the union of all remaining words in the first set of auction objects.