Patent ID: 8688698

Claim:
A method executed by a computing device, comprising: receiving a text segment and a request to supplement the text segment from an authoring environment, wherein the text segment is a partial sentence from a free-form text entry comprising a plurality of sentences entered into a text editor of the authoring environment, and wherein the request to supplement the text segment is received in response to an indicator, wherein the indicator is a combination of keystrokes entered by an author, signaling a request for suggestions; submitting a query to a search engine, the query being generated from the text segment; receiving a plurality of search results from the search engine in response to the query, each search result including an information snippet based on an information source corresponding to the search result; generating one or more suggestions for supplementing the text segment from the information snippets, including: generating one or more candidate suggestions from each information snippet, wherein each candidate suggestion for supplementing the text segment includes a portion of a corresponding information snippet, the information snippet including the text segment and the candidate suggestion including a non-matching part of the information snippet, wherein the non-matching part is determined based on determining a position of the indicator relative to the text segment and identifying a portion of the information snippet that corresponds to a position of the indicator relative to the text segment, and wherein the one or more candidate suggestions each include factual information that relates to the text segment; calculating a relation score for each of the one or more candidate suggestions, wherein the relation score represents a likelihood that the particular candidate suggestion, when presented, will be selected by a user to supplement the text segment, and wherein calculating the relation score includes calculating the relation score based on a weighted combination of a length of each candidate suggestion, a frequency with which the candidate suggestion appears in the information snippets, and a history of the candidate suggestion being selected by a user to supplement the text segment; and generating the one or more suggestions from the candidate suggestions according to the relation score; and providing the one or more suggestions for supplementing the text segment for display in the authoring environment.