Patent Document ID: 9031962
Application ID: 13398904

Base Claim:
1. A method of processing a search request received from a user operating an input device, the search request directed at identifying a desired item from a set of items, each of the items having one or more associated terms, the method comprising: providing access to the set of items; for each item in the set of items, associating a set of terms to describe the item and assigning a relevance value for each term in the set of terms based on a relevance of the term in identifying the associated item; receiving a query input from a user via the input device directed at identifying the desired item, the query input comprising one or more characters of one or more prefixes for terms the user is using to identify the desired item; as a character of the query input is received from the user, performing a first incremental find to compare one or more user-entered prefixes with the terms associated with the items and to retrieve the relevance values for the one or more user-entered prefixes matching terms associated with the items; determining a first ranking order of items found in the first incremental find based at least in part on the retrieved relevance values in the first incremental find; ordering and transmitting one or more items found in the first incremental find based on the first ranking order to be displayed to the user; in response to receiving input including at least one subsequent text character, performing a second incremental find to compare the one or more user-entered prefixes, including the at least one subsequent text character and any preceding text characters, with the terms associated with the items and to retrieve the relevance values for said one or more user-entered prefixes matching terms associated with the items; determining a count of the number of characters received from the user; adjusting the relevance value assigned to at least one of the terms associated with one or more of the items retrieved in response to the one or more user-entered prefixes based on the count of the number of characters received from the user; determining a second ranking order of the items found in the second incremental find based at least in part on the adjusted relevance values in the second incremental find; and ordering and presenting one or more items to the user based on the second ranking order so that a relative order of the items found in both the first and second incremental finds is adjusted as characters are entered, further comprising the terms associated with the items being organized into searchable subspace categories, each subspace category having a relevance bias value, wherein at least one of determining the first ranking order and determining the second ranking order is further based on the relevance bias values of the subspace categories, wherein the relevance bias values are based on the count of the number of text characters received from the user.

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Claim 3:
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the subspace categories include a personalized history category containing terms associated with items identified from previous incremental finds conducted by the user.