Patent ID: 7424469

Claim:
A method for a generating an ordered list of documents, the method comprising: (a) receiving at least one search term; (b) searching in at least one document database for documents related to the at least one search term; (c) retrieving a first list of documents relating to the at least one search term and ranking the first list using a form of an OKAPI ranking algorithm forming a first ranked list; (d) searching in a query click-through data store to find documents previously retrieved and selected by at least one user where search terms similar to the at least one search term were used, the query click-through data store comprising a tabularized log of search terms, documents, and relevance frequencies; (e) accessing a second list of documents from the query click-through data store wherein the second list of documents represents selections of documents by at least one user under the conditions of previous searches; (f) ranking the second list according to one of a Naive Bayes and a Maximum Entropy ranking algorithm forming a second ranked list; and interleaving the first ranked list and the second ranked list forming an interleaved list of documents, wherein duplicate documents from the first ranked list and the second ranked list are removed from the interleaved list, and wherein steps (b) and (d) are performed in parallel.