Patent ID: 7757250

Claim:
A system for ranking items in a selectable information list received from an information delivery system, comprising: a database system that logs selections of information viewed by local users of the information delivery system and tags each of the logged selections of information with a corresponding time subinterval from a plurality of time subintervals that relates to a respective viewing of the selected information; a filtering component that forms a temporally filtered reviewed items list that includes a subset of the logged selections of information viewed by the local users, the subset chosen to incorporate the logged selections tagged with a particular one of the plurality of time subintervals that includes a target time period for providing a recommendation, the temporally filtered reviewed items list provides implicit evidence of content preferences associated with a likely subset of the local users that employs the information delivery system during the particular one of the plurality of time subintervals; a collaborative filtering system that infers the content preferences associated with the likely subset of the local users by utilizing the subset of the logged selections included in the temporally filtered reviewed items list as an input, and generates the recommendation specific to the inferred, likely subset of the local users based at least in part on the inferred content preferences and information obtained from a plurality of global users related to the particular one of the plurality of time subintervals, wherein the filtering component comprises a popularity filter that selects a recommendation based, at least in part, by multiplying a collaborative filter score of a recommendation by the probability that the user does not know of the recommendation; and a user interface that displays the recommendation.