Patent ID: 8209616

Claim:
A computer-implemented system for interfacing a Web browser widget with social indexing, comprising: a collection of articles of digital information and a plurality of social indexes that are each associated with a social community, that are both electronically-stored in persistent storage, each social index comprising a hierarchy of topics that each relate to at least one such article and a fine-grained topic model for each topic, each of the fine-grained topic models comprising a pattern evaluable against the articles, wherein the pattern identifies such articles matching the fine-grained topic model's topic; a computer comprising a processor and memory within which code for execution by the processor is stored, comprising: a topic builder maintaining for each topic in each of the social indexes a coarse-grained topic model comprising: a characteristic word extractor that extracts characteristic words from the articles identified by the fine-grained topic model of each topic; and a characteristic word scorer that assigns scores to the characteristic words: a widget server interfacing to a widget remotely executing on a Web browser, accepting a request from the widget that identifies one such social community, and identifying a Web page currently in view on the Web browser; a media collector obtaining content comprised in the Web page; a social indexing server obtaining the social index for the social community, evaluating the fine-grained topic models in the social index against the content, and selecting topically-relevant information based on the topics in the social index corresponding to those of the fine-grained topic models matched to the content; and a user interface visually providing the topically-relevant information to the widget arranged for presentation through the Web browser via the widget on the Web page.