Patent ID: 8719249

Claim:
A method, implemented at least in part via a processing unit comprising hardware, for classifying a query, comprising: performing a search of an index of documents using a query to obtain initial search results comprising one or more documents referenced in the index of documents, a document referenced in the index of documents assigned a category at crawl time; classifying the query with a classification distribution based upon one or more categories assigned to the one or more documents within the initial search results, the classification distribution comprising at least a first percentage of documents within the initial search results associated with a first category and a second percentage of documents within the initial search results associated with a second category, the first percentage corresponding to a first confidence level and the second percentage corresponding to a second confidence level; determining an ambiguity score for the query based upon a spread of at least the first percentage and the second percentage within the classification distribution; and returning query results based upon the ambiguity score.