Patent ID: 8181203

Claim:
A system for an interactive television program guide database, comprising: a plurality of clients, each client in the plurality of clients is in periodic communication with at least one server; a subsystem for periodically receiving, at a client, program guide information from the at least one server; a subsystem, at the client, that for each periodically received program guide information: extracts text from fields in the program guide information; processes the extracted text to create keys, each created key is associated with a program identifier; sorts the created keys; eliminates redundant keys from the created keys to create a set of unique keys so that each unique key is paired with a list of program identifiers corresponding to each occurrence of the unique key in the created keys before the elimination of redundant keys; and sorts the unique keys; a viewer interface on the client that accepts viewer alphanumeric input; and a subsystem, at the client, for searching the program guide information by comparing the unique keys to a viewer's alphanumeric input.