Patent Document ID: 7792821
Application ID: 11427693

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of automatically providing search query refinement options using a computing device having processor, memory, and data storage subsystems, the computer-implemented method comprising: receiving an unstructured web-search query request from a user via a user input component; initiating an unstructured web-search query according to the unstructured web-search query request; obtaining a first set of web-search results in response to said unstructured web-search query, wherein the first set of web-search results are ranked in order of relevance; determining whether sufficient common structure attributes are present in the first set of web search results to satisfy a structure threshold, wherein the structure threshold is satisfied if a sufficient percentage or absolute count of the first set of web search results have one or more common structure attributes, and the common structure attributes comprise similar name-value pairs having shared common name fields in meta-tags or in XML-code contained in the first set of search results; analyzing a subset of top-ranked web-search results from the first set to identify a common structure attribute present in the subset; analyzing the first set of web-search results according to the identified common structure attribute in the subset analysis; automatically generating a set of search refinement options according to the analysis of the first set of web-search results according to the identified common structure attribute; communicating the set of search refinement options for display to a user output device; receiving a selection of one of the search refinement options; and communicating a second set of web-search results resulting from the selected search refinement option to the user output device.

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Claim 4:
4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1 , wherein a plurality of common structure attributes comprise overlapping schema attributes.