Patent Document ID: 7836108
Application ID: 12059628

Base Claim:
1. An automated method, comprising: identifying documents in a current clustering operation; assigning the identified documents to one or more clusters; selecting a current representative document for each of the one or more clusters; determining whether the current representative document has been re-crawled; determining a previous representative document with which the current representative document was previously associated in a prior clustering operation, if it is determined that the current representative document has not been re-crawled; determining one of the one or more clusters to which the previous representative document has been assigned in the current clustering operation; combining one of the one or more clusters associated with the current representative document that has not been re-crawled with the one of the one or more clusters associated with the previous representative document into a combined cluster; and storing information regarding the combined cluster.

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Claim 4:
4. The automated method of claim 1 , where assigning the identified documents to the one or more clusters includes: assigning the identified documents to the one or more clusters based on a content-based clustering technique.