Patent Document ID: 9449028
Application ID: 13340721

Base Claim:
1. A computer system for providing a dynamic definitive image service, the system comprising: a processor and memory configured to execute software instructions embodied within the following components; an image data store that stores one or more images or references to images stored in other data stores; an image request component that receives a request during a query for a definitive image that is representative of a topic of the query; an inverted index component that maintains an inverted index that maps one or more query terms to one or more images that are related to those terms; an image ranking component that ranks one or more images identified in the index that potentially match the query terms to sort identified images by a relative likelihood of being a definitive image for the topic of the query; an editorial override component that provides an interface through which a human editor can manually override the definitive image selected by other components of the system to identify an editor-chosen definitive image; an image selection component that selects a definitive image based on images returned from the index, any overridden editor-chosen definitive image, and ranking input from the image ranking component; a thumbnail retrieval component that retrieves an image binary associated with the selected definitive image based on a definitive image identifier provided by the image selection component; and an image response component that responds to the received image request with the retrieved image binary.

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Claim 2:
2. The system of claim 1 wherein the image request component receives the request and invokes the inverted index component to find one or more images potentially matching the request, the image ranking component to rank potentially matching images based on relevance and quality, the editorial override component to identify any additional images provided by editors, the image selection component to select one among the potentially matching images as a definitive image, and the thumbnail retrieval component to access the selected image from the image data store.