1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a computer device that performs on-line searches; and, more particularly, to computer-based data searching adaptively provides search results to a user based on user interaction over time.
2. Related Art
Search engines are a popular way of searching for search results or an unknown website based upon a search string entered by a user. Search engines today are very popular and provide many users with a way to search for websites that provide the user with desired information, programs, downloads, or entertainment. A typical search engine identifies received a user search string, searches a database for search results related to the search string, and compiles a search result list. The search result list is often selected based on hit accuracy and presented to the user based on prior user selection popularity. “Hit accuracy” is determined by computing a relevance that the search result has to the search string. If the search result seems sufficiently relevant to the search string, that search result is selected and placed in the search result list. “User selection popularity” identifies the items that are most viewed or most selected by other users. Since many users view these search results, it is assumed that these search results are more desired by other users as well. Therefore more “popular” search results within the search result list are presented first to the user first. The results are typically displayed in groups of 10 or so. To get more search results, a “next” button can be pressed to allow the user to see the next 10 search results in a search result list, and so on. If users don't seem to find what they were looking for, subsequent selections are accessible via the “next” button are required for viewing, whereby the user may have to search through hundreds or thousands of search result to find the results they find interesting. Each subsequent search result page moved to by the user can provide more unrelated websites, thus wasting user's valuable time. Changing the search string is likely to result in the same kind of random hunt for search topics of interest.
As an example, let's assume someone entered “Angelina Jolie” as a search term. The search engine would go off and find all search results that are highly correlated to the search term “Angelina Jolie” and place them into a search result list. Then the search engine will process which search results were most popular among users and present the current search user with the top 10 or so most popular sites. Today, this “Angelina Jolie” search would result in 10 search results being listed regarding Angelina's adoption of a new daughter. This news is the most current and most important, and this information floods to the top of the search list drowning out all other information that may be relevant to the user. Therefore, if the user wanted to find what movies Angelina starred in through the 1990s, or information on her humanitarian efforts, or wedding pictures of her and Brad Pitt, etc., the user would have to scan many search results to get to the information they seek, if they even can find that information in the large search result list that was generated sequentially for presentation to the user. Unfortunately, this process of working down through many search result in one dimension from the most popular sites or search results to the least popular may not be feasible in situations where there are thousands of hits and the most popular search results are not always a perfect indicator of your interests. To remedy this situation, a user is often forced to begin adding what might prove to be unreasonable search terms that: a) attempt to screen (NOT function) the more popular search results (e.g., in the Angelina example above, entering “not adoption” into the search string) to allow the less-popular targets to “bubble to the top”; and/or b) attempt to pluck out the exact information needed in a sea of information by deriving very complex search terms directly. Often, this isn't feasible and the search approach wastes time without providing successful yield. These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.