Patent ID: 8676803

Claim:
A system comprising: one or more computers; and a computer-readable medium coupled to the one or more computers having instructions stored thereon which, when executed by the one or more computers, cause the one or more computers to perform operations comprising: for each of a plurality of digital images stored in a computer storage medium: (i) associating, in a search system, co-click data with each individual image, the co-click data for the individual image identifying other images associated with the individual image because the same user selected, from presentation on search results pages of search results identifying images that are responsive to a particular query, both search results identifying the individual image and search results identifying the other images, and (ii) identifying, for each individual image, a subsequent user-submitted query that was submitted subsequent to user selection of a search result that identified the individual image; assigning images from the plurality of images to clusters of images based on: (i) the co-click data associated with each of the plurality of images, and (ii) the subsequent user-submitted queries associated with each of the plurality of images; receiving, in the search system and after the images from the plurality of images have been assigned to the clusters of images based on the co-click data and the subsequent user-submitted queries, a user query from a user device, wherein the user query comprises user-entered text; identifying, by operation of the search system and after the images from the plurality of images have been assigned to the clusters of images based on the co-click data and the subsequent user-submitted queries, at least two of the clusters that match the user query by identifying that the user query includes one or more terms that are the same as terms included in label data for the images in the at least two of the clusters, or terms included in source context data for the images in the at least two clusters; and providing, from the search system to the user device in response to the user query, a respective cluster result for each of the at least two identified clusters, where each cluster result includes multiple individual search results that each identify an image that was assigned to the respective identified cluster based on the co-click data for the image and the subsequent user-submitted query for the image, wherein at least one of the respective cluster results includes an individual search result that identifies an image that does not match the user query.