Patent ID: 7958128

Claim:
A system for presenting entities mentioned in books, comprising: a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing executable computer program instructions comprising: an entity importance engine for assigning query-independent importance scores to entities of an entity type mentioned by books in a corpus, wherein there are a plurality of entity types, the importance scores assigned to the entities indicate relative importance of entities of a same type mentioned by a book, and an importance score of an entity is based at least in part on a context in which the entity is mentioned in the book; a search module for receiving a search query from a requestor, identifying a list of a plurality of books in the corpus that at least partially satisfy the query, and ranking the books in the list in an order based at least in part on the query-independent importance scores assigned to entities mentioned by the books; and a presentation module for presenting the plurality of books to the requestor in the ranked order; and a processor for executing the computer program instructions.