Patent ID: 8126891

Claim:
A method of predicting a search engine switch, the method comprising: tracking via a generative model a sequence of events initiated by a user in a search engine use session; predicting via the generative model whether the user will request to switch search engines based upon the sequence of events tracked; and in response to predicting a search engine switch and prior to the user requesting a search engine switch, taking an action toward changing an experience of the user; wherein the generative model was previously formed by building a training set of user search data from an initial set of user search data, the initial set of user search data comprising a plurality of sequences of search events, by extracting a selected number of search events preceding each occurrence of an event of a target search event type from the initial set of user search data; extracting a plurality of frequent episodes from the training set of user search data, each episode comprising an ordered sequence of search events in the training set of user search data; filtering the plurality of frequent episodes to determine a plurality of significant frequent episodes; associating each significant frequent episode with an HMM in which a frequency ordering among the significant frequent episodes is preserved as a likelihood ordering among a corresponding mixture of HMMs; and building the generative model by forming a weighted mixture of the HMMs for the target search event type.