Patent ID: 7472113

Claim:
For use with a search engine, a query pre-processing pipelining computing system that prepares to selectively execute a user entered query made up of a string of query terms on one or more of a plurality of data sources, the computing system comprising: a processor and/or storage media configured with: a query term recognizer that, before execution of the query, examines the query terms and identifies and automatically groups query terms that are intended as a phrase, wherein the query is a new query for which the user is requesting data that satisfies the query; a query type recognizer that, before execution of the query, examines the query terms and automatically categorizes the query as one of a plurality of query types; a query intent personalizer that gathers information about the user who entered the query and provides this information to the query term recognizer and query type recognizer to be used before execution of the query; a query modifier that, before execution of the query, modifies the user entered query based on the term grouping determined by the query term recognizer and based on the query type determined by the query type recognizer; and a query federation module that selects one or more data sources from the plurality of data sources and causes execution the modified query on the one or more selected data sources, a data source comprising a source of data that can receive queries and execute the queries by searching for data of the data source that matches the query.