Patent ID: 8666914

Claim:
A method of determining relevance of a plurality of entity pages to queries, wherein the entity pages reference a plurality of product pages, the method comprising: receiving training data including results of an existing product relevance function for a plurality of entity pages, the training data further including an association between the plurality of entity pages and product pages for a plurality of entities; selecting an objective function configured to produce a degree of fit which indicates an extent to which an entity relevance function fits the training data, the training data including a plurality of queries, the entity relevance function configured to determine relevance of an entity page based upon weighted quantitative measures of features of the entity page and the queries in the training data, and the objective function being configured to increase or decrease the degree of fit based upon a comparison of the relevance of the entity page to at least one threshold value; identifying the plurality of entity pages based upon the plurality of product pages and the association between entity pages and product pages; generating the entity relevance function by at least: determining a current parameter range; generating an entity relevance values by invoking the objective function, using the plurality of entity pages in the training data as input, for each set of parameters in the current parameter range; and determining the degree of fit for the entity relevance values to the existing product relevance values; and providing the entity relevance function to a search engine for use in determining relevancies of entity pages to subsequent queries.