Patent ID: 7213256

Claim:
A method for searching an electronic program guide comprising: displaying a schedule for a first program from program data; extracting a selected program's title from said schedule; displaying a plurality of first search elements derived from the description of the first program and a selected program's title; enabling a user to modify the selected title, the modified title being at least one of an abbreviation, a truncation and an expansion of the selected title; selecting at least one of the plurality of first search elements; enabling a user to assign discrete incremental weight to at least one of said plurality of first search elements, the discrete incremental weight being a discrete value specified via an input device; finding at least one of a plurality of second programs similar to the first program, the found program having at least one of a plurality of second search elements derived from the description of the second program that matches the selected search element; and displaying the found programs most similar to the first program before the found programs least similar to the first program, wherein the found programs most similar to the first program have the greatest number of search element matches.