Patent ID: 8024332

Claim:
A method in a computing device for presenting questions of a question search, the method comprising: providing a collection of questions having terms, each question having a topic of one or more terms of the question and a focus of one or more terms of the question, the topics and focuses of the questions of the collection identified by generating a question tree of the questions of the collection and generating a cut of the question tree, a topic of a question comprising terms of the question before the cut and the focus of a question comprising terms of the question after the cut; receiving a queried question; identifying by the computing device questions of the collection that are relevant to the queried question; providing a search result with identified questions of the collection that are relevant to the queried question, the identified questions of the search result being originally ranked based on relevance to the queried question; re-ranking by the computing device the search result by: generating topic clusters of the identified questions of the search result based on similarity between the topics of the identified questions and using a star clustering algorithm; for each topic cluster of questions, generating focus clusters of the identified questions within the topic cluster; and ranking the focus clusters within the topic cluster based on the identified question within each focus cluster with the highest original rank; and displaying as search result information organized based on the topic clusters and the ranked focus clusters within a topic cluster.