Patent ID: 8024341

Claim:
A method in a computing system for expanding a set of seed queries, comprising: for each of the seed queries: accessing a behavioral index that maps from actual queries received from users to other actual queries received from the same users during the same time period; for each of a plurality of candidate queries other than the seed query, determining a score indicating the extent to which the candidate query is mapped-to from the seed query by the behavioral index; accessing a contextual index that maps from actual queries received from users to other actual queries based upon text provided by multiple publicly-available sources in response to the actual queries; for each of a plurality of candidate queries other than the seed query, determining a score indicating the extent to which the candidate query is mapped-to from the seed query by the contextual index; for each of the candidate queries: combining the scores indicating the extent to which the candidate query is mapped-to from the seed queries by the behavioral index to obtain a behavioral score for the candidate query; combining the scores indicating the extent to which the candidate query is mapped-to from the seed queries by the contextual index to obtain a contextual score for the candidate query; combining the behavioral score for the candidate query with the contextual score for the candidate query to obtain an overall score for the candidate query; and selecting as expanded queries the proper subset of the candidate queries having the highest overall score.