Patent ID: 6941321

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for calculating the similarity between two objects in a collection of objects, wherein each object is associated with at least a first feature vector and a second feature vector, each of the first and second feature vectors being a multi-dimensional vector, the first feature vector being representative of a first feature of the objects and the second feature vector being representative of a second feature of the objects, the first feature being a one of a first set of multi-modal features including a text feature, a URL feature, an inlink feature and an outlink feature, and the second feature being an image feature, comprising the steps of: identifying the first feature vector for a first object and the first feature vector of a second object; computing a first distance metric between the first feature vector for the first object and the first feature vector for the second object; identifying, without reference to textual information, the second feature vector of the first object and the second feature vector of the second object; computing a second distance metric between the second feature vector for the first object and the second feature vector for the second object; and computing a sum of the first distance metric and the second distance metric.