Patent ID: 7885963

Claim:
A method of searching electronic program guide (EPG) data, comprising: receiving a text search string by way of a search string receiver, wherein the text search string contains one or more text terms and one or more attribute terms; normalizing the text search string to make searchable terms by: applying spell checking to the text search string, identifying a word as being misspelled, and appending a corrected form of the word identified as being misspelled to the searchable terms to conduct a conditional search based on the corrected form of the word; separating the searchable terms into text terms and attribute terms by way of a string interpreter, the string interpreter parsing the text search string to separate the searchable terms into the text terms and the attribute terms by comparing the searchable terms with a list of attributes for identifying the attribute terms; performing a text search in the EPG data for each text term; performing an attribute search in the EPG data for each attribute term; and ranking results from the text and attribute searches for displaying search results conforming to the text search string, the ranking comprising lowering a relevancy ranking of hits resulting from the conditional search on the corrected form of the word when search results are obtained based on the word identified as being misspelled.