Patent ID: 8255396

Claim:
A profiling system comprising: a profile management system, including a processor and a memory encoded with computer executable instructions configured to cause the profile management system to receive profile information including at least one preference regarding entities, generate electronic profiles for each respective entity, and store the electronic profiles in an electronic profile storage medium; a disambiguation engine configured to receive the at least one preference associated with a respective entity, identify terms related to the preference, and store at least one identified term in the electronic profile storage medium with the respective entity's electronic profile; an analysis engine configured to receive a request to evaluate content items for a first entity from a requestor, the analysis engine configured to access the electronic profile of the first entity, compute a relevance number for each of the respective content items based on information retrieved from the electronic profile of the first entity including the at least one preference, wherein the requestor is not permitted to access the profile information; an indexing engine configured to index a plurality of content items according to terms contained in plurality of content items and store the indexed content items in a plurality of indexed content stores, wherein each of the plurality of indexed content stores includes indexing information based, at least in part on a relative frequency of terms in the respective list of content items; and wherein the disambiguation engine is coupled to one or more of the indexed content stores and configured to identify terms related to the preference by querying the one or more indexed content stores with the preference.