Patent ID: 8341019

Claim:
A method of profiling a user comprising: collecting, in a first data structure within a database, information on a click stream, the click stream being associated with a user on a client computer, wherein the click stream comprises a user identifier of the user, network addresses requested by the user and temporal information and wherein a server computer performs the collecting; obtaining, by the server computer, meta tags in a second data structure from at least one source utilizing the information collected on the click stream associated with the user on the client computer, the at least one source being remote from the server computer and the client computer, wherein the meta tags comprise network address categorization for the network addresses and the second data structure includes network addresses corresponding to category information providing categorization of each of a plurality of Internet sites; generating a third data structure from information obtained from the first data structure and the second data structure by matching the network addresses in the first data structure and the second data structure, the third data structure comprising user identifiers including the user identifier, categorization information corresponding to the network addresses, and temporal information; and obtaining a profile for the user from information in the third data structure, wherein the profile for the user is obtained utilizing: the information including the network addresses collected from the first data structure by the server computer on the click stream associated with the user on the client computer; the network address categorization collected from the second data structure for the network addresses as indicated by one or more of the meta tags obtained from the at least one source; comparing the information in the third data structure with existing profiles; and associating the user with an existing profile based on the comparison; and based at least in part on the profile for the user, providing information regarding an item or offering the item to the user.