Google Disclosed Time Function for Desktop Search
May 7, 2009
Time is important to Google. Date tags on documents are useful. As computer users become more comfortable with search, date and time stamps that one can trust are a useful way to manipulate retrieved content.
The ever efficient USPTO published US7,529,739 on May 5, 2009, “Temporal Ranking Scheme for Desktop Searching”. The patent is interesting because of the method disclosed, particularly the predictive twist. The abstract stated:
A system for searching an object environment includes harvesting and indexing applications to create a search database and one or more indexes into the database. A scoring application determines the relevance of the objects, and a querying application locates objects in the database according to a search term. One or more of the indexes may be implemented by a hash table or other suitable data structure, where algorithms provide for adding objects to the indexes and searching for objects in the indexes. A ranking scheme sorts searchable items according to an estimate of the frequency that the items will be used in the future. Multiple indexes enable a combined prefix title and full-text content search of the database, accessible from a single search interface.
You can snag a copy at http://www.freepatentsonline.com or you can brave the syntax at the USPTO here.
Stephen Arnold, May 7, 2009
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