Patent ID: 7779013

Claim:
A programmed digital computing device implemented system for determining a quantitative measure of search efficiency of related Web pages, comprising: a storage device configured to store a search query comprising one or more submitted keywords and a plurality of related Web pages; a processor comprising: an input module configured to identify a target Web page within the plurality of Web pages; a search function module configured to identify potential Web pages comprised in the related Web pages that each satisfies the search query as search results; a results module configured to list the potential Web pages that include at least one hyperlink referencing another of the potential Web pages and that each comprise proximal cues describing distal content of the other potential Web pages referenced by the hyperlink; a network generation module configured to generate an activation network, comprising: a graphing module configured to build a directed graph comprising nodes corresponding to the listed potential Web pages and arcs corresponding to the hyperlinks; and a weighting module configured to assign a weight to each arc to represent a probability of traversal of the corresponding hyperlink by comparing the keywords in the search query to the proximal cues included in each of the potential Web pages; a simulator module comprising: a selector module configured to select a node from the directed graph; a designator module configured to define traversals through the activation network from the selected node to the node corresponding to the target Web page; and an evaluator module configured to compute the probability of finding the target Web page as a quantitative measure of search efficiency, by calculating a product of the weights of the arcs along each traversal between the selected node and the node associated with the target Web page and by summing the product of the weights of the traversals; and a display configured to display the probability of finding the target Web page as a quantitative measure of search efficiency.