Patent Document ID: 8661050
Application ID: 12500657

Base Claim:
1. A method comprising: receiving a search request from a search user; creating a network of entities, the network including relationships among the entities, wherein the entities include a search user entity representing the search user and one or more result entities; defining trust components and similarity components for the relationships among the entities, wherein the similarity components express relative similarity of the entities and the trust components express relative trust among the entities; identifying a plurality of search results, wherein the one or more result entities provide the plurality of search results and the plurality of search results are identified based on the search request; for the plurality of search results provided by the one or more result entities, determining, from the network, a set of relationships connecting the search user entity to the one or more result entities along one or more paths; determining, based on the set of relationships connecting the search user entity to the one or more result entities, relevance values for the plurality of search results, wherein the relevance values are determined based on both: individual similarity components that express relative similarity of individual entities along the one or more paths, and individual trust components that express relative trust among the individual entities along the one or more paths; ranking the plurality of search results based on the relevance values for the plurality of search results; and presenting, to the search user, individual search results from the plurality of search results according to the ranking, wherein at least the ranking is performed by a hardware computer processor.

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Claim 13:
13. The method of claim 1 , wherein the creating the network further comprises: identifying a first set of first entities having first relationships with the search user entity; adding the first set of first entities to the network; and for individual first entities in the first set, identifying a second set of second entities having second relationships to the individual first entities, and adding the second set of second entities to the network.