Patent ID: 8843468

Claim:
A method for identifying transactional queries comprising: examining a plurality of executed queries to identify a plurality of URLs associated with the executed queries; passing the URLs to a web crawler to extract a plurality of forms that users have clicked on; associating the extracted forms with the corresponding executed queries; generating a query-form graph based on the extracted forms and corresponding executed queries; examining the query-form graph to identify a plurality of query-form patterns for predicting whether an unclassified query is a transactional query; receiving an unclassified query of unknown type; comparing the received query to the plurality of query-form patterns, wherein the comparing comprises: matching sub-strings in the received query with labels associated with user input fields in the extracted forms; removing the matching sub-strings from the received query; and selecting a first query-form pattern from the plurality of query-form patterns that is a best match to the received query; and classifying the received query as a transactional query if the comparison satisfies at least one pre-established criterion.