Patent ID: 8332417

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for searching using contextual data, comprising: capturing information selected by a user from a first document that is presented on a display, the information comprising first data captured from a first area of the display and including content that is considered by the user to be relevant to a target text of a second document and the information further comprising second data captured from a second area of the display and including a context of the first data, the context including hierarchical XML structures comprising at least one of a row, column, table, table heading and tag; converting the first data and the second data to one or more extensible markup language (XML) representations of the content and the hierarchical XML structures; providing hierarchical textual instances with formatting corresponding to the XML representations; automatically generating a query for searching in a search engine for the textual instances, the query comprising a target textual representation of the textual instances and comprising the context and hierarchical XML structures in which the textual instances are found; contextually modifying the query by addition of user-supplied words; and executing the query to find text and context in the second document that contains or is similar to the target textual representation in the hierarchical XML structures of the query, wherein any of said steps are implemented in either of computer hardware or computer software and embodied in a non-transitory computer-readable medium.