Patent ID: 7685099

Claim:
A method in a computing device for determining a causal relationship between a first query and a second query, the method comprising: for each of a plurality of intervals, providing the frequency of the first query and the frequency of the second query during the interval, each frequency indicating number of times a query is submitted to a search engine; identifying first events of the first query by analyzing the frequencies of the first query and second events of the second query by analyzing the frequencies of the second query, each event representing frequencies over a sequence of intervals that satisfy both a baseline criterion and a climax criterion, the baseline criterion indicating a minimum frequency for each interval in the sequence and the climax criterion indicating a minimum frequency for at least one interval in the sequence; for combinations of first events and second events, generating an event causal score indicating the causal relationship between the first event of the combination and the second event of the combination; and generating a query causal score indicating the causal relationship between the first query and the second query by aggregating the event causal scores of the combinations of events of the first query and the second query; wherein the generating of a query causal score includes generating event/query causal scores between first events and the second query indicating causal relationship between a first event and the second query and aggregating the event/query causal scores to generate the query causal score.