Patent Document ID: 9990428
Application ID: 15245261

Base Claim:
1. A search system comprising: a device controller configured to provision a device to execute a copy of a selected mobile application selected from among a plurality of mobile applications; a crawler configured to extract content and metadata from a plurality of states of the copy of the selected mobile application using the device; a search input state classifier configured to identify search input states within the plurality of states of the selected mobile application, wherein identifying search input states is performed based on a first set of heuristics, wherein the first set of heuristics includes recognition of user-visible search indicia from the extracted content and metadata of the selected mobile application and recognition of items of the extracted metadata of the selected mobile application that correlate with search functionality; a parameter identifier configured to identify, for each of the search input states of the selected mobile application, necessary input parameters for a search function corresponding to the search input state; a search function data store configured to store a record for each identified search function in the selected mobile application, wherein each record includes: a navigation path within the selected mobile application to reach a search input state of the corresponding search function, an indication of input parameters required to be supplied to the corresponding search function, and a mapping of the input parameters to user interface widgets of the search input state; and a query processing system configured to, in response to a query, (i) identify a first search function record from the search function data store based on the query, (ii) within a first mobile application corresponding to the first search function record, navigate to the search input state of the first search function record according to the navigation path of the first search function record; (iii) based on parameters specified by the query, selectively perform the search function of the first search function record in the first mobile application, (iv) scrape content from a resulting search results state of the first mobile application, and (v) present the scraped content to a user.

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Claim 10:
10. The search system of claim 1 wherein the query processing system comprises: a user interest finder configured to receive a query from a user device and identify a set of entity types to describe segments of the query; a search function matcher configured to identify at least one search function record from the search function data store, wherein: the at least one search function record includes the first search function record, and each of the at least one search function record has a set of required input entity types that is a subset of the identified set of entity types; a live scrape system configured to: execute the first mobile application within a device; within the first mobile application, navigate to the search input state of the first search function record according to the navigation path of the first search function record; supply parameters to the search input state based on the parameters specified by the query; perform the search function in the first mobile application; and scrape content from a resulting search results state; and a results module configured to assemble the content from the live scrape system for each of the at least one search function and transmit the assembled content to the user device.