Patent Document ID: 6167397
Application ID: 08935827

Base Claim:
1. A method for clustering electronic documents in response to a search query, the method comprising the steps of: collecting a first set of electronic documents, each containing at least one occurrence of a first keyword from the search query; collecting a second set of electronic documents each containing at least one occurrence of a second keyword from the search query; combining said first set of electronic documents and said second set of electronic documents to create a collection of electronic documents, each electronic document in said collection containing at least one occurrence of a keyword from the search query; analyzing each electronic document in said collection to determine a content characteristic in a predefined neighborhood adjacent to at least one of said keywords from the search query; comparing content characteristics of each document in said collection of electronic documents to content characteristics of other documents in said collection; and creating a plurality of clusters of electronic documents, at least one cluster including at least two of said electronic documents in said collection of documents, wherein in a given cluster the electronic documents have overlapping content beyond a commonality of keywords from the search query.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 wherein said content characteristics of a document include a list of words within a pre-defined proximity to the keywords in the document and which words each have a ratio of number of appearances in the document to number of appearances in the collection of documents that falls within a predetermined range, and wherein said overlapping content includes at least one word that appears on each document's list of words for the documents in the given cluster.