Patent ID: 8010545

Claim:
A computer-implemented system for providing a topic-directed search, comprising: a plurality of evergreen indexes for topically-limited subject areas, each of the subject areas comprising articles of digital information and for each of the evergreen indexes, comprising: a hierarchy of topics; and a fine-grained topic model paired to each of the topics in the topic hierarchy, each of the fine-grained topic models comprising a pattern evaluable against the articles, wherein the pattern identifies such articles matching the fine-grained topic model's topic, that are both electronically-stored in persistent storage; a computer comprising a processor and memory within which code for execution by the processor is stored, comprising: a topic builder that, for each topic in each of the evergreen indexes, maintains a coarse-grained topic model comprising: a characteristic word extractor that extracts characteristic words from the articles identified by the fine-grained topic models of each topic; and a characteristic word scorer that assigns scores to the characteristic words; and a search engine that specifies a topic search comprising search terms, and that evaluates the coarse-grained topic model of each of the topics in the evergreen indexes by matching the search terms and accumulating their scores; a user interface that visually presents the evergreen indexes comprised of the topics that comprise the coarse-grained topic models having the best scores; and further comprising at least one of: a display module comprising code for execution by the processor that comprises: a topic emphasizer highlighting the topics in the best scoring evergreen indexes as presented in the user interface, comprising at least one of emphasizing a to percentile of the articles corresponding to the search query, emphasizing the topics whose matching coarse-grained topic models have a cumulative score exceeding a threshold, and emphasizing the topics comprising top-scoring characteristic words that match the search terms; and a topic elider eliding the topics presented in the user interface that fall below a set matching score; an index identifier identifying the best scoring evergreen indexes by one or more of name, theme, and augmented community of online users; and a pattern evaluator evaluating each of the patterns for the fine-grained topic models comprised in the best scoring evergreen indexes against the digital information, the fine-grained topic models corresponding to the topics that comprise the coarse-grained topic models having the best scores, and providing access to at least a part of only that digital information that matches at least one of the patterns.