Patent ID: 7283997

Claim:
A method of presenting to a user documents retrieved from a document collection by a plurality of search engines in response to a query, each document represented by a document vector in a vector space derived from terms in the document collection, the method comprising: generating from the query a query vector in the vector space; comparing the query vector with a plurality of feedback query vectors, each feedback query vector associated with at least one user feedback vector, each user feedback vector indicating an aggregated user interest in documents including terms associated with the user feedback vector; determining a feedback query vector that is most similar to the query vector; determining at least one document vector that is most similar to the user feedback vector associated with the most similar feedback query vector; ranking the retrieved documents by assigning the document associated with the at least one most similar document vector to a priority higher than the priority of remaining retrieved documents; and presenting the retrieved documents to the user according to the ranking.