Patent ID: 8504488

Claim:
A method, comprising: obtaining source or destination information from a data packet flowing from a user device with an analysis component of a processing device; examining a payload of the data packet for one or more keywords; comparing data within the payload of the data packet to the one or more keywords, the keywords are associated with a common subject of interest; establishing a number of times in which one of the keywords matches at least a portion of the data; ranking an interest in the common subject in part based on the established number of matches; and defining, with an interest compilation component of the processing device, a user interest vector that correlates the source or destination information, the common subject and the ranked interest, and records a time stamp when the correlation occurs for the packet, the time stamp including an indication of a time when an occurrence value associated with the user interest vector is updated, enabling the tracking of a frequency of interest during a plurality of predetermined periods of time, the defining further including performing statistical analysis on time-based trends based on the time stamp and based on a time period selected subsequent to the recording of the time stamp.