Patent ID: 7428530

Claim:
A method of generating search results comprising: receiving a search request from a user, said search request including one or more terms; querying a searchable central data index as a function of the received search request to identify electronic documents for relevance with respect to the one or more terms in the search request, said index containing document data associated with a plurality of electronic documents, said document data specifying one or more categories associated with each of the electronic documents and including a ranking value associated with each of the electronic documents relative to the categories, said ranking value being stored in the index and indicating a relevance of a particular electronic document to a particular category, said index organizing said document data by dispersing said document data belonging to various categories associated with each of the electronic documents in said index; assigning a confidence level to each of the one or more specified categories; in response to the querying, generating search results identifying electronic documents based on relevance to the one or more terms in the search request to be displayed on a single result page, wherein the generated search results include relevant electronic documents within the various categories from the index that correspond to the one or more terms in the search request based on the ranking value associated with each of the electronic documents and the confidence level of the one or more corresponding categories; dispersing the generated search results according to the specified one or more categories associated with each of the electronic documents identified in the search results; sorting the dispersed search results of said querying according to the one or more categories as a function of the ranking value associated with each of the identified electronic documents; and displaying the sorted results to the user such that one or more of the identified electronic documents in different categories are displayed to the user on the single result page.