Patent ID: 8620892

Claim:
A method for indexing online references of an entity, the method comprising: identifying an entity, wherein the entity is an individual, corporation, brand, or product; identifying one or more channels of the Internet to be searched for references to the entity; identifying one or more types of signals to be evaluated within each of the one or more channels, the one or more types of signals including one or more of a frequency of a reference to the entity on a Web Page included in the one or more of the channels and a location of the reference to the entity on the Web Page; crawling the channels of the Internet, using a crawler, to look for and to locate references to the entity after the entity is identified for the crawler, wherein crawling the channels of the Internet comprises: searching the one or more channels of the Internet that are publically available to look for and to locate references to the entity; searching the one or more channels of the Internet that are publically available to look for and to locate one or more signals of the one or more identified signal types, the one or more signals relating to and including information about the located references to the entity; and evaluating the one or more signals after the one or more signals are located by the crawler; and constructing a reverse index of the references to the entity, wherein the reverse index is based on each channel in which a reference to the entity is located and the one or more signals evaluated for the located reference to the entity.