Patent ID: 8056100

Claim:
A method for recommending one or more textual information items to customers from a content collection of textual information items, the method comprising the steps of: predetermining descriptive characteristics of the content in said collection; creating content profiles of said textual information items, said content profiles indicating the presence or absence of said descriptive characteristics of said textual information items; creating one or more customer profiles without a customer explicitly expressing preference for said predetermined characteristics; said customer profiles representing the customers' preferences for said predetermined characteristics; storing said customer profiles in a memory in association with respective customer identities; retrieving a customer profile subsequently from said memory, by name or customer identity; operating a computer adapted by stored programming to find a subset of said textual information items having content profiles that closely match said customer profile; and electronically sending said subset at least partly via a data communications network to said customer for selection of a textual information item in the subset.