Patent ID: 7668850

Claim:
A method for searching content, comprising: submitting questions from a user to a data retrieval system; receiving back at a computing system content from the data retrieval system associated with the submitted questions; providing one or more taxonomies associated with the received content, each of the taxonomies identifying a hierarchical classification of the content in categories according to facets of the taxonomy; providing a plurality of rules, each of the rules comprising a condition in a regular expression language and an associated action triggered when the condition is satisfied; matching the regular expression language of the conditions with one or more words or concepts contained in the submitted questions; satisfying the conditions of one or more of the rules when the regular expression language of the conditions of the one or more rules matches one or more of the words or concepts contained in a particular one of the submitted questions and extracting a range of values from the particular one of the submitted questions; prior to displaying any of the content in response to the particular question, triggering the actions associated with the one or more rules having the conditions whose regular expression language matches the one or more of the words or concepts contained in the particular question, wherein the actions triggered by the one or more rules automatically select at least some of the facets, and wherein one of the associated actions triggered by the satisfied conditions is used to then select one or more of the facets in the taxonomies that cover the range of values extracted from the particular one of the submitted questions as one or more of the facets automatically selected by the actions triggered by the one or more rules; subsequent to receiving back the content, classifying the content according to the facets automatically selected by the actions triggered by the one or more rules; displaying only portions of the content associated by the classifying with the facets automatically selected by the actions triggered by the one or more rules.