Patent Document ID: 9047278
Application ID: 13673015

Base Claim:
1. A method performed by data processing apparatus, the method comprising: identifying queries in query data; determining, in each of the queries, (i) an entity-descriptive portion that refers to an entity and (ii) a suffix; determining query counts of a number of times that the respective queries were submitted; for at least a particular query of the identified queries, distributing the query count for the particular query among multiple different entities by assigning, to each of the multiple different entities, a partial query count that is an estimate of a number of submissions of the particular query that refer to the entity; estimating, based at least in part on one or more of the partial query counts, an entity-level count of query submissions that include a particular suffix and are considered to refer to a first entity of the multiple different entities; determining that the first entity is a particular type of entity; determining a type-level count of the query submissions that include the particular suffix and are estimated to refer to entities of the particular type of entity; and assigning, based on the entity-level count and the type-level count, a score for the particular suffix with respect to the first entity.

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Claim 12:
12. The method of claim 1 , wherein multiple different suffixes are associated with the particular type of entity, each of the multiple different suffixes having a corresponding type-level count; wherein assigning the score for the particular suffix with respect to the first entity comprises: determining a scaling factor for the type-level count for the particular suffix based on a highest type-level count from the different type-level counts of the multiple different suffixes, the highest type-level count being different from the type-level count for the particular suffix; determining a scaled score by applying a scaling factor to the type-level count; and assigning the score for the particular suffix based on the entity-level count and the scaled score.