Systems, methods and apparatus to determine relevance of search results in whole/part search

Abstract

Systems, methods and apparatus are provided through which, in one aspect, one or more wholes and parts of wholes are searched in a database, presented to a user, sold and / or distributed.

Description

RELATED APPLICATION [0001] This application claims the benefit of copending U.S. Original application Ser. No. 10 / 914,770 filed Aug. 9, 2004 which is a continuation in part of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 888,870 filed Jul. 10, 2004 entitled “Systems, Methods and Apparatus of a Whole / Part Search Engine” which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60 / 542,746 filed Feb. 6, 2004 under 35 U.S.C. 119(e).FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0002] This invention relates generally to searching and distributing data over a network, and more particularly to searching and distributing digital products over the Internet. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0003] Simple, intuitive and accurate tools for locating products online are a fundamental requirement for e-commerce on the World Wide Web (WWW). For e-commerce to be successful, the experience of using an e-tailer's digital storefront must compete with the simplicity of walking into a brick and mortar store and being directed to a physical...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

"The patent describes a search engine that combines web-based search technologies with product-oriented database technologies to provide a fast and accurate search from within a single text field. The search engine can search for both physical and digital music products and determine a relevance score for each potential hit based on several different factors. The technical effects of this invention include improved scalability, better user experience, and more accurate search results."

Problems solved by technology

These search engines were limited in function, performance and flexibility.

Although digital music files had been widely available on the web prior to this time, the content was unlicensed and the early aggregators and distributors were violating copyright laws.

Consequently, there was no significant investment in improving the user's experience and success rate of locating digital music files.

This represents a significant shift in both the number of products that must be managed within digital music catalogs, and the complexity of the catalogs that now have to support products or songs that are included in many different albums.

However, such conventional implementations are ultimately limited in the accuracy they can provide through simple search interfaces.

They do not capture the interrelationships of the items that are being searched, and therefore often miss the actual result being sought.

As an example, consider a user looking for albums that contain both of the Beatles songs “Help” and “Yesterday.” Conventional album searches may locate albums that contain the two songs, but conventional download searches will fail to bring back any result that does not contain both of the words “help” and “yesterday” in a single song's attributes.

Even in conventional album searches, the inability to recognize the input as two distinct popular song titles will result in poor relevance ordering of the results.

Other conventional implementations within the realm of search technology, suffer from additional limitations.

Such limitations include requiring multiple search fields in which a user must identify the type of attribute to search within (e.g. must select ‘artist’ to search on an artist's name).

The limitations make it difficult to search using different attribute types.

In addition, much of the available data is not available as search criteria or for display in the results of a search.

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