Patent ID: 8862608

Claim:
A method of providing search results in response to a query, the method comprising: obtaining, by a computer system, access to a corpus comprising a plurality of documents; characterizing, by the computer system after the obtaining, a document of the plurality of documents by selecting one or more first categories from a hierarchal category tree that are reflected in the document and assigning in memory of the computer system the one or more first categories to the document, the hierarchal category tree comprising a taxonomy of different business categories; receiving, by the computer system after the assigning, a query; identifying, by the computer system after the receiving, one or more second categories from the hierarchal category tree that are reflected in the query; generating, by the computer system, a plurality of scores comprising a category score quantifying how similar the one or more first categories are to the one or more second categories, a text score quantifying how frequently one or more words in the query appear in the document, and a relevance score comprising a combination of the category score and the text score made according to a mathematic formula; using, by the computer system after the generating, the relevance score to rank the document within search results corresponding to the query; and displaying the search results on a display forming part of the computing system.