Patent ID: 7249058

Claim:
A method for enabling an on-line merchant to tailor a response to a shopper's on-line interrogation comprising: obtaining rankings and descriptions of products or services from a plurality of sources including at least one on-line merchant and one on-line service provider; reranking by a rerankers of the products or services at least partially based on a count of hits to product descriptions in the merchant databases in response to on-line requests of the shopper specifying characteristics of a product or services desired by the shopper; modifying the ranking of at least one of the products ranked by the reranking, which modification is by a weighting factor based on a product strategy of the reranker so that the ranking is in accordance with the following formula: R =1 −n Rank Factors Score+ n (weighting factor) where: Rank Factors Score is a score resulting from the reranking n is a number less than 1 representing the proportion of the adjustment applied to the weighting factor R=Rank; and providing a presentation of products or services to the shopper that presents the products in order of rank determined by both the initial ranking and the modification of at least one of the reranked products.