Patent Document ID: 8682723
Application ID: 12558788

Base Claim:
1. A method of targeting online advertising, comprising: repeatedly crawling the web to maintain a database of historical online content in a computer system; applying search engine queries via the computer system to the database to produce search results, wherein said queries include keywords, Boolean operators and universal resource indicators (URIs) defining a topic of conversation to be explored; optimizing said search result sets for relevance to said topic by applying multiple queries to produce a search result set over time including multiple instances of online content related to said topic of conversation and publishers of said multiple instance of topic related online content; determining influence of said publishers on said online content on the topic of conversation by scoring, in said search result sets, a) attributes of both a particular instance of said topic related online contents, as well as b) attributes of online content that link to that particular instance, and c) a conversational correlation between two or more of said publishers related to said topic of conversation; and thereafter targeting online advertising to one or more of said publishers determined to then have the highest level, or rate of change, of influence.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein said topic is a conversation between said online content publishers.