Patent Document ID: 7779012
Application ID: 10987283

Base Claim:
1. A method for creating data for use in ranking results of a search of a plurality of pages in an intranet, each page comprising a plurality of terms arranged in a hierarchical structure, the method comprising acts of: (A) parsing the plurality of pages to identify the plurality of terms, wherein at least one page of the plurality of pages comprises a plurality of instances of a term of the plurality of terms; (B) automatically computing, for each instance of each identified term and for each page in the plurality of pages in which the identified term appears, a specificity value of the instance, the specificity value being computed, for each instance of the identified term on the page, based upon a combination of a tag parameter associated with the instance and a term level of the instance within the hierarchical structure of the page, the term level being measured from at least one root level of the page; (C) the act of combining, for each identified term and for each page in the plurality of pages in which the identified term appears, the computed specificity values of the instances of the identified term within the page to produce a combined computed specificity value of the identified term; (D) storing, for each identified term and for each page in the plurality of pages in which the identified term appears, the combined computed specificity value of the identified term and an identifier for the page; and (E) ranking a plurality of matching pages in the plurality of pages, the matching pages returned in response to a search query performed on the plurality of pages, the ranking based on a comparison, for each matching page, between the combined computed specificity value stored for an identified term matching a term of the query and a degree of specificity associated with the query, wherein the matching pages are identified as including an identified term matching a term of the query based on the identifier for the page stored for the identified term.

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Claim 19:
19. The method of claim 1 , wherein act (B) comprises computing a normalized overall term specificity value (NTW) for a term in a page, relating to all appearances of the term in the page, according to the following formulae: 
 NLW=NL−TTL; 
 TW =Tag W+NLW; 
 NTW =log( STW/ASTW ); and wherein: NL is a raw term level of the term within the hierarchy of the page, as measured from a root tag of the page; TTL is a threshold term level defining a normalized minimum nesting level of the term for all pages of the intranet including the term; TagW is a tag specificity parameter ascribed to the term based on an HTML tag type of the immediate parent of the term; STW is a sum of all the TW values for all appearances of a term in a particular page; and ASTW is an average of all STW parameter values for a term for all pages in which the term appears in the intranet.