Patent ID: 8108417

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of providing a recommendation in response to a user query, the method comprising: providing a human-generated list archive comprising a plurality of ordered human-generated lists, wherein each human-generated list comprises a plurality of objects and each object has an associated rank; determining a first relationship between objects in a first human-generated list of the plurality of ordered human-generated lists, wherein the first relationship contains one or more relationship scores based at least in part on a first plurality of object ranks based on the first human-generated list; determining a second relationship between objects in a second human-generated list of the plurality of ordered human-generated lists, wherein the second relationship contains one or more relationship scores based at least in part on a second plurality of object ranks based on the second human-generated list; determining a third relationship between objects in the first and second human-generated lists based upon the first and second relationships; receiving a user query, wherein the user query is associated with a query object vector; matching the query against the human-generated list archive to retrieve a recommendation, wherein matching comprises: retrieving the query object vector, creating an associated object vector by expanding the query object vector, and comparing the query object vector to the associated object vector to determine a recommendation, wherein the recommendation is based at least in part on the first, second, and third relationships; and providing the recommendation to the user.