Patent ID: 6910037

Claim:
A method for a processor to process results of a search, wherein the search results are electronic documents comprised of terms, the method comprising the steps of: a) determining a document frequency (DF) of some or all terms in a global set of electronic documents, wherein the document frequency is a frequency of a term over a global set of documents; b) determining a term frequency (TF) of some or all terms in each document in the search results, wherein the term frequency is a number of times a term appears in a particular electronic document; c) determining a TFIDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) for some or all terms in each particular electronic document in the search results by dividing the TF of step (b) by the DF of step (a); d) calculating an overall TFIDF for each of the terms for which the TDIDF was determined in step (c), wherein an overall TFIDF for a particular term is a sum of all TFIDFs for that particular item in the electronic documents of the search results; e) selecting a number M of terms with overall TFIDFs based on their overall TFIDFs, wherein M is less than or equal to the total number of terms with overall TFIDFs; f) converting each electronic document in the search results into vector format whereby a corresponding vector entity is created for each electronic document, wherein only the determined overall TFIDF values of selected M terms are vectors; g) calculating similarity measures between the corresponding vector entities of step (f); h) using the calculated similarity measures to cluster the electronic documents in the search results by clustering their corresponding vector entities, whereby at least one cluster is formed; and i) selecting a representative electronic document for each of the at least one cluster by selecting a centroid vector entity in each cluster.