Patent ID: 8868579

Claim:
A method performed by a computer processor to identify web pages accessible on a computer network that are relevant to a query entered by a user, each web page having a source being a website identified by a website domain name, the method comprising the steps of: (a) receiving an exclusion specification from the user, the exclusion specification comprising a specification of at least one characteristic of sources, wherein the at least one characteristic of sources does not include an identifier of a particular web page or an entity, a domain name or a company name, and wherein the at least one characteristic of sources relates to the source per se and is shared by a plurality of sources; (b) receiving the query from the user; (c) creating a list of identifiers of web pages relevant to the query, wherein the creating a list of identifiers comprises: (i) identifying an initial list of identifiers of web pages accessible on the computer network, wherein the web pages are accessible on the computer network from the sources that are not excluded by the exclusion specification, wherein the web pages are sorted by declining relevance of the web pages to the query; (ii) identifying the source of the web page for each listed web page, wherein each source is assigned a rank equal to the number of distinct sources of web pages above the first occurrence of a web page from that source in the initial list; (iii) removing web page identifiers from the list for which the source of the web page is excluded by the exclusion specification, wherein a first characteristic of sources in the exclusion specification is a specified maximum rank in the initial list, so that all web pages from a source with a rank less than or equal to the specified maximum rank are removed from the list, wherein a second characteristic of sources in the exclusion specification is a maximum value of a quantitative measure of the quality of the sources, a smaller value of which measure means that the source is of higher quality, so that web pages from sources having a quality value less than or equal to the specified maximum value are excluded from the list of identifiers of web pages relevant to the query; and (iv) creating a list of sources that were excluded by the exclusion specification; (d) displaying a portion of the list of identifiers of web pages relevant to the query starting with the first web page in the list, the first web page being the most relevant web page; (e) displaying a portion of the list of sources that were excluded by the exclusion specification that was received from the user and used to produce the list of identifiers of web pages relevant to the query; (f) receiving from the user an indication that one of the sources in the list of excluded sources should not be excluded; (g) updating the list of identifiers of web pages relevant to the query to include web pages from the source that the user indicated should not be excluded; and (h) displaying a portion of the updated list of identifiers of web pages relevant to the query.