Patent ID: 8549013

Claim:
A system for determining customer interest associated with an item, the system comprising: a data store that stores data associated with a plurality of discussion forums; and a computing device, having one or more processors, in communication with the data store and that is configured to: identify in the data store one or more discussion forums associated with the item; determine interest criteria associated with the item based at least in part on the one or more discussion forums associated with the item, wherein the interest criteria includes a number of user posts in the one or more discussion forums; apply a decay factor to at least one of the user posts in the one or more discussion forums based at least in part on a posting time associated with the at least one user post; and determine an interest score associated with the item based at least in part on the determined interest criteria, wherein the determined interest criteria considered in determining the interest score associated with the item includes the number of user posts in the one or more discussion forums.