Patent ID: 8290921

Claim:
A method in a computing device for identifying queries that are similar to a target query, the method comprising: for each query, storing frequencies at which users submitted the query during intervals, the frequencies of the intervals representing a time series of frequencies for the query; calculating a mean of the frequencies for the target query; for each of the queries, calculating, by a computing processor, an overall similarity score between the query and the target query based on the frequencies of the query and the target query of the time series; calculating a mean of the frequencies for the query; and for each of a plurality of time sub-series of the time series for the query, when the time sub-series for the query includes a frequency peak that satisfies a peak criterion based on the calculated mean of the frequencies for the query and the time sub-series for the target query includes a frequency peak that satisfies a peak criterion based on the calculated mean of the frequencies for the target query, calculating, by the computing processor, a partial similarity score between the query and the target query for the time sub-series based on the frequencies of the query and the target query for the time sub-series; and identifying queries that are similar to the target query based on the overall similarity scores and only those partial similarity scores of the queries for which the target query and the queries both have frequency peaks.