Patent ID: 7493273

Claim:
A method facilitating the identification of similar auctions, comprising: receiving a set of keywords relating to an auction; searching, based on the set of keywords, a database of auction objects each containing at least one word, to identify a first set of auction objects; identifying a model auction; for at least one auction object in the first set of auction objects, determining the probability that the at least one auction object is similar to the model auction based, at least in part, on distinctiveness of the keywords in the set of keywords relative to the words in the first set of auction objects, and corresponding position weightings based on positions of the keywords relative to the other words contained in each auction for the first set of auction objects, wherein the distinctiveness of a keyword in the set of keywords is determined by computing a value D, where D ⁡ ( Ki ) = 1 - ϕ ⁡ ( E ⁡ ( M , Ki ) ) ϕ ⁡ ( M ) , and wherein M represents the first set of auctions; K represents the set of keywords; K i is an element in the keyword set K such that K i εK; E(M,K i ) is a function that returns a set of auctions in M such that each returned auction contains the keyword K i ; and φ(X) is a function that returns the total number of elements in the set X, except the empty set; wherein the position weighting of a keyword in the set of keywords is determined by computing a value G, where G ⁡ ( Ki ) = f ⁡ ( Position ⁡ ( W , Ki ) N ) , and wherein W represents a description of an auction M i εM where W has been reduced to a set of meaningful keywords; N represents the total number of words in W, Position(W,K i ) returns the position of the first occurrence of keyword K i in W starting from the beginning position of W, or a zero value if the keyword K i is not found in W; F(x) is a function where x ranges from 0 to 1, f(x) ranges from 0 to 1, and f(0)=1 and f(x) decays to 0 as x approaches 1; wherein the determining step further comprises computing, for the at least one auction, the difference between 1) the sum of the products of the distinctiveness and the position weightings for each keyword in the set of keywords, and 2) the sum of the products of the distinctiveness and the position weight for each word in the union of all remaining words in the first set of auction objects.