Patent ID: 7275083

Claim:
A computer system for providing, to a product/service provider, profile information about prospective customers, comprising: a data acquisition process for extracting text documents from unstructured Internet discussion sites; wherein the data acquisition process operates by accessing an Internet discussion site independently of, and without activation by the participants of the discussion site; wherein each discussion site comprises a collection of text documents generated by participants of the discussion site and simultaneously available to multiple participants of the discussion site; an archive database for storing the extracted text documents; a harvester for receiving queries from the product/service provider, each query representing a request for information about participants who are discussing a specified product or service; wherein the harvester responds to each query by accessing the archive database; wherein the harvester is further operable to provide email addresses of the participants who are discussing the product or service; thereby identifying prospective customers; a customer profiler operable to use the email addresses to perform reverse look-up to obtain profile data about the prospective customers, and to forward the profile data to the product/service provider; and a web server for providing access to the harvester via a web browser and the Internet, such that the product/service provider interacts with the harvester to make the requests on line via the Internet and to receive the outputs generated by the harvester and the profiler.