Method and System for Determining and Graphically Communicating the Relative Importance of a Resource
Specification
RELATED APPLICATION DATA
This application claims the priority date of provisional application no.
62/082,598 filed on November 20, 2014, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety.
BACKGROUND
Often, a person will browse multiple websites and other resources throughout the day seeking information on current events, such as top news, sports,
entertainment, and so on. Since it is also often the case that the person has a limited amount of time to browse, the person may miss an important news story, reading a less important story in its place. Thus, the person has little ability to determine which stories presented over several websites are important relative to other stories. Also, it is often difficult for a person to frequently visit a list of their favorite websites in a timely manner in order to remain current on information, especially when there is a significant gap in time between visits to the website where the user could miss a story that was cycled through during the time between visits.
The person may have many favorite websites, blogs, social sites and other web accessible information sources that she frequents for business or personal use throughout the day. The person may spend large amounts of time navigating from one information source to another in order to get and remain current on changes at those sources. The person may open many tabs in order to quickly switch from one source to another in an attempt to stay current on these many sites. The person may bookmark a multitude sites and navigate to those bookmarks in order to stay informed. All of these solutions require that the person leave a first source of information to go to another and while at the other source, they risk the possibility that important information has changed on sites they are not viewing and if they do not navigate to that site quickly enough that update will be lost. A person may have so many favorite sites that they may lack sufficient time to effectively navigate all of them or may forget to navigate to one or many of them.
The person may employ news aggregators to stay abreast of news and information on the internet. Aggregators typically use RSS (rich site summary or really simple syndication) to present information summaries on the person's personal page. Publishers of information such as news sites, blogs or audio and video providers can choose to syndicate their information on RSS so that the user, usually by way of an aggregation site such as IGOOGLE, PULSE, FLIPBOARD, and the like, may view these summaries or headline information on a single page or multiple pages. A person of an aggregation site may select many information sources which would then be displayed on a page so that updates from many sources can be quickly read and managed.
In order for RSS to operate, a publisher must first post to an RSS feed which is then sent out to users that have requested or subscribed to that feed on their selected aggregation site. The information that a publisher selects to publish may not be the most important or even the most current; and therefor, the feed may not be a reflection of what is current on the publisher's actual site or most recent in the world of information. RSS feeds may not be prioritized in a hierarchical manner and stories that are less news worthy can be placed ahead of those that are more important. While an RSS user may be able to select a feed source, they cannot select the exact portions of a site that get published and may have to endure many undesired feeds and summaries before receiving one that is needed. It is possible that important information may be delayed by a publisher to an RSS feed as they may choose to prioritize placement of that information elsewhere. Finally, many publishers on the internet simply do not provide RSS feeds, especially more esoteric sites or sites traditionally not thought of as requiring information feeds, such as shopping, couponing, hobby and other consumer based sites and interests. Furthermore, current aggregation systems have no effective means to organize the stories in terms of relative importance, where the most important story can be located prominently and the least important story located less prominently.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
A method of graphically displaying a relative order of importance of one or more defined regions within one or more web resources, under control of one or more computing systems configured with executable instructions is provided. The steps of the method may include identifying, by the computing system, a first defined web resource region; identifying, by the computing system, a second defined web resource region, wherein the first defined web resource region and the second defined web resource region are each one of a manually defined region and an automatically defined region of a logical grouping of enclosed elements; ranking, by the computing system, the first defined web resource region relative to the second defined web resource region by order of importance calculated using a first measured characteristic associated with the first defined web resource region and a second measured characteristic associated with the second defined web resource region; and displaying a graphical user interface on a user computer, the graphical user interface graphically communicating the order of importance of the first defined web resource region relative to the second defined web resource region.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE SEVERAL VIEWS OF THE DRAWINGS
FIG. 1 illustrates a schematic representation of a typical site page or other web resource or web document within a web browser instance, schematically showing multiple defined regions without content;
FIG. 2 illustrates a schematic representation of the site page highlighting two defined web resource regions with example content within the site page of FIG. 1 ;
FIG. 3 illustrates a schematic representation of two defined web resource regions displayed within the system graphical user interface, each representing a channel with the ability to navigate to multiple articles within the same channel window; and
FIG. 4 illustrates a schematic representation of a channel window displaying a first article;
FIG. 5 illustrates a schematic representation of a channel window displaying a third article;
FIG. 6 illustrates a schematic representation of a channel window displaying a fourth article; and
FIG. 7 is a magnified schematic view of an embodiment of the importance graph.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS
The detailed descriptions set forth below in connection with the appended drawings are intended as a description of embodiments of the invention, and is not intended to represent the only forms in which the present invention may be constructed and/or utilized. The descriptions set forth the structure and the sequence of steps for constructing and operating the invention in connection with the illustrated embodiments. It is to be understood, however, that the same or equivalent structures and steps may be accomplished by different embodiments that are also intended to be encompassed within the spirit and scope of the invention.
The present method determines the relative order of importance of one or more defined regions which contain news stories or other information within one or more web resources and displays on a user' s device a graphical representation of the order of importance. The defined regions may be manually defined or may be automatically defined by detecting a logical grouping of enclosed elements which meet defined criteria. Characteristics of the defined regions are measured and given weight in the calculation of the order of importance, such as location of the defined region within a webpage, the number of likes, shares, impressions, comments, and the like. Multiple separate defined regions are compared and ranked using order of importance. The separate defined regions may be compared within a graphical or schematic representation, such as a bar graph, so the user can quickly determine the more important story, and navigate between them. Example computer networks are well known in the art, often having one or more client computers and a server, on which any of the methods and systems of various embodiments may be implemented. In particular the computer system, or server in this example, may represent any of the computer systems and physical components necessary to perform the computerized methods discussed in connection with the present figures and, in particular, may represent a server (cloud, array, etc.), client, or other computer system upon which e- commerce servers, websites, web browsers and/or web analytic applications may be instantiated.
The illustrated exemplary server and client computer are known to a person of ordinary skill in the art, and may include a processor, a bus for communicating information, a main memory coupled to the bus for storing information and instructions to be executed by the processor and for storing temporary variables or other intermediate information during the execution of instructions by processor, a static storage device or other non-transitory computer readable medium for storing static information and instructions for the processor, and a storage device, such as a hard disk, may also be provided and coupled to the bus for storing information and instructions. The server and client computers may optionally be coupled to a display for displaying information. However, in the case of servers, such a display may not be present and all administration of the server may be via remote clients. Further, the server and client computers may optionally include an input device for
communicating information and command selections to the processor, such as a keyboard, mouse, touchpad, and the like.
The server and client computers may also include a communication interface coupled to the bus, for providing two-way, wired and/or wireless data communication to and from the server and/or client computers. For example, the communications interface may send and receive signals via a local area network or other network, including the Internet.
In the present illustrated example, the hard drive of the server or the client computer is encoded with executable instructions, that when executed by a processor cause the processor to perform acts as described in the methods of the present figures. The server communicates through the Internet with the client computer to cause information and/or graphics to be displayed on the screen, such as HTML code, text, images, and the like. The server may host the URL site with the article or other information, which may be accessed by the client computer. Information transmitted to the client computer may be stored and manipulated according to the methods described below, using the software encoded on the client device.
The presently described and claimed method operates in conjunction with the software methods and computer systems described in detail in pending patent applications which share one or more inventors with the present application. These applications include U.S. Patent Application No. 14/407,031, entitled "Active Web Page Consolidator", published as US 2015/0142920, U.S. Patent Application Serial No. 14/760,188, entitled "Active Web Page Consolidator and Internet History Management System", published as WO 2014/110294, and U.S. Patent Application Serial No. 14/290,839, entitled "Mapping of Defined Regions Within a Webpage", published as US 2014/0344655, which are each hereby incorporated by reference in their entirety.
Referring to US 2015/0142920 and WO 2014/110294, a system and method is described for a user to create a frame about portions of a site (such as by manual use of a rectangle select tool via mouse or touch gestures) to define a region, capture one or more framed portions, then organize and view selected portions of websites on a graphical user interface, with the captured portions of the website refreshed at a rate which allows the user to remain up-to-date in near real time on important websites. Methods are described which allow the user to frame one or more portions of a web site URL (uniform resource locator) they wish to have displayed on their user interface screen as an image captured by the system, rather than building the web site portion using the code provided by the site (such as HTML code). The framing specifications may be unique to that user and selected URLs are saved to a server for later retrieval and use. The user is permitted to organize multiple framed selections of web sites on a page or pages of their user interface screen for best viewing. These tools allow for movement, placement and sizing of framed portions of selected sites and a means for reframing the same to include additional information or exclude unwanted information.
The framed portion or portions of the user specified URLs are loaded onto a user interface screen when the user visits their personalized site. This is accomplished by capturing a recent image (usually in bitmap format) of a URL site or sites specified by the user and applying the saved framing, sizing and placement settings to the newly retrieved image or images. This process or capturing, framing, sizing and placing of URL sites is repeated often enough and images of the same refreshed on the user interface screen so that any time a user visits their user interface screen, they are presented with the most recent information of their one or many site URLs for quick review.
From the user' s interface screen, the user is able to select the image of the framed portion site, causing the web browser to automatically open a tab and navigate to that URL site or alternatively, opening a frame or portal to the sites URL within the user interface screen giving the user full access to information they had been made aware of at their home page.
The above methods involve a web based application with the substantial portion of the executable code and processing preferably occurring on remote servers, thus reducing the work load at a user's device. The remote servers could include a web server for checking URLs and sending URLs to the queue server, a queue server for maintaining a list of URLs to be captured, a capture server for building the website and capturing an image of the website, and a database for storing captured images.
Patent application publication US 2014/0344655, describes a method of automatically detecting indicators of defined regions (such as div blocks or divisional elements) within a website, where the defined regions meet certain criteria, including having an internal hyperlink or being located in a particular position on the webpage. The dimensions and location of each defined region is determined and recorded as a pixel dimension on a Cartesian coordinate system. An image of the entire webpage is captured as described above. The captured image can be divided by defined regions by applying or overlaying the pixel coordinate system to the image and cropping or extracting out each defined region. The captured image of each defined region may be placed on the user's graphical user interface and refreshed with a new, more recent image, when the defined region is recaptured in successive visits.
Referring now to Figures 1 and 2 an exemplary web resource (20), such as a web page, is illustrated schematically, as it would be built in a web browser. The dashed lines indicate defined regions (21) within the web resource (20), with the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) shown in particular as example defined regions which are determined to be important by either the method of the present system or by the user. As described above, the defined regions (21) may be manually selected by the user by creating a selected area by mouse or finger gestures, or the defined regions may be automatically selected by mapping out the divisional elements or other indicators of defined regions. Various rules for the automatic determination of the borders of defined regions (21) are described further below, in which software installed on a local computer or on a server carries out the method. It can be seen that the web resource (20) has multiple defined region (21), where the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) are at the topmost portion of the page and towards the reader' s left. In English language publications, it is often the case that the upper left portion of the page receives the most attention by the reader/user. Thus the position of the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) in this example indicates a higher likelihood of being important relative to the remaining defined regions (21), especially those at the bottom of the page, or below the fold. I other languages or cultures, alternative locations of defined regions (21) may indicate importance, such as the upper left portion of the web resource (20) for languages read right to left.
Many web resources (20), for example news sites, have multiple defined regions (21), often with a headline, an image, a short introductory statement, and an internal link that opens the full article or the first page of the article when selected. In Figure 2, the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) are shown in isolation from the remaining unselected defined regions. Although both the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) are illustrated as having an image or a particular format, the articles may be represented in various way, with or without accompanying images. The system, installed on a local computer or a server, may either capture an image of the content within the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) or may collect the data within the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) to be reconstructed within the user interface (26) or manipulated into a different form for display in the user interface (26). Looking at Figure 3, the graphical user interface (26) is shown schematically., with a first channel (28) displaying content from the first defined web resource region (22) and a second channel (30) displaying content from the second defined web resource region (22). The locations of the first channel (28) and the second channel (30) may be determined by the user through dragging or similar move command, or may be determined by order of channel selection with the earliest selected channel being placed at the upper left, or may be determined by the order of importance of the story, article, or other content within the channel. Thus, if the location of the channel is determined by order of importance, the first channel (28) in the upper left corner of the background (32) of the user interface (26) would communicated to the user that the first channel (28) is more important than the less prominently positioned second channel (30). However, other positioning of the channels may be chosen to indicate their relative importance.
The first channel (28) and the second channel (30) may display an image of the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) respectively, with an image of the defined region being captured as described in the above referenced applications. One or more hyperlinks may be associated with the image of the defined region, such that when the user selects any portion or a particular portion of the channel (28 or 30), an image or full article will be displayed to the user. For example, the user may select or click the first image (34) or the first article link (36) to open a window displaying the full content associated with the link, such as the full article or a full resolution file of the image (34). Alternatively, the content within the first defined web resource region (22) and the second defined web resource region (24) may be used to create a new format for displaying the content within the channel, which is a rearranged version of the original content or a wholly new format or design. For example, if the original defined region lacks an image or contains a less desirable image, a related image may inserted, where the related image may be found through an image search of the internet using keywords from the article, from local files on the server, or from other appropriate sources.
Each channel (28 or 30) may be updated with new content which is collected recursively, perhaps every 60 seconds, from the same defined region. For example, the first channel (28) may be updated several times daily with new content from the first defined web resource region (22). Alternatively, each channel (28 and 30) can be a collection of referenced defined regions in one or multiple sites, chosen as a group by the user or by a logical category. For example, the first channel (28) is titled "Top News" and the second channel (30) is titled "Sports". In this way, news stories or other articles on the top front page of a news site could be considered top news and be presented in the first channel (28), no matter the category. While stories or articles found within a specified sports section or page of a site or from a sports site may be classified as sports related and be presented in the first channel (28).
In one embodiment, a user can input one or more URLs or similar resource locations which point to particular sites. Utilizing the below discussed methods, the present system can automatically determine the subject of the article and the importance of the article either generally or specifically to the user. Thus, the user may input three news sites as their choice of news sources; and the system will seek out the top news stories within the defined regions to be displayed in succession, one story after another, in the first channel (28). Likewise, the defined regions of one or more sports pages or sites may be analyzed and displayed in succession in the second channel (30). Figures 4-6 illustrate yet another embodiment of the present system and method, describing how multiple articles or stories may be cycled within the channels. In this example, the first channel (28) is shown cycling from the first article link (36), to a third article link (44) and third image (42), and to a fourth article link (48) and fourth image (46). The articles may cycle automatically, every few seconds or so, or may be manually cycled or proceeded to the next story or prior story by selection of the forward navigation button (52) or the back navigation button (54).
At the bottom right portion of the first channel (28) is an importance graph (50), which is a bar graph in this example. Although a bar graph is used in this example, numerous methods of graphically displaying information regarding the status of the articles and/or the importance of the articles may be used. Here a series of side-by-side status bars (56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76) are illustrated to create the status bar chart (78). Each bar represents the status of an associated story or resource. In this example, a first color, such as gray, represents a story that has been read or at least viewed, as shown in status bars (56, 58, 60, and 62) in Figure 7. A second color, such as yellow, indicates the story currently being displayed within the first channel (28), as shown in status bar (64). A third color, such as blue, indicates that the associated story has not been viewed, as shown in status bars (66, 68, 70, and 72). And, a fourth color, such as red, indicates a new story that has not been viewed, as shown in status bars (74 and 76). Thus, the read and age status of each story can be quickly determined by looking at the color, shading, hatching, etc. of the associated status bar.
The importance graph (50) shown in Figure 7 is a magnified view of the importance graph from Figure 4. Figures 4, 5, and 6 illustrate the change in displayed stories as the user selects the forward navigation button (52). In Figure 4, status bar (64) is highlighted with the second color. After the user selects the forward navigation button (52) in the example of Figure 4, the third image (42) and third article link (44) are displayed, and the status bar (64) changes color from the second color to the first color to indicate the first article (36) has been at least viewed. Thus, status bar (66) is associated with the first image (34) and the first article (36). In the importance graph (50') of Figure 5, status bar (66) is associated with the third image (42) and third article link (44). Thus, status bar (66) is highlighted with the second color to indicate that the third image (42) and third article link (44) are currently displayed. Likewise, in the importance graph of Figure 6, status bar (68) is highlighted with the second color to indicate that the fourth image (46) and fourth article link (48) are currently displayed. Further, status bar (66) has changed to the first color to indicate that the third image (42) and third article link (44) have been viewed.
As can be seen, the color of the status bars change with age and as they are viewed or read. The leftmost status bars of the status bar chart (78) represent the oldest stories. The status bar colored with the second color indicates the status bar associated with the currently displayed story. The second color may move to the right or left, as the user navigates forward or back by swiping or clicking. The rightmost status bars of the status bar chart (78) represent the newest stories.
As can also be seen in Figure 7, the height of each status bar (56, 58, 60, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76) may differ compared to the other status bars. The height of the status bars indicate the relative or absolute importance of an associated story. The importance of a story or resource is calculated by the present system and method, as is explained in greater detail below. In the example of Figure 7, status bars (56 and 76) are the two highest or tallest status bars with the status bar chart, indicating that the stories associated with status bars (56 and 76) are more important than the stories associated with the remaining status bars. Status bar (60) is shortest among the status bars, indicating that the story associated with status bar (60) is least important compared to the stories associated with the remaining status bars.
There are a number of factors, on which one or more may be used to determine the importance of a story, including the position within the source web document, the number of impressions per unit time, the increase in the number of impressions per unit time, the number of social likes, the number of social shares, the number of comments or engagement with comments, the length of time the story is displayed in the source web document, the length of time related subject matter is displayed in the source web document, the number of subscriptions, and the popularity in a web search engine, which are detailed below.
Generally, looking at a news websites, the most important and most recent stories are at the top of the page and often to the top left. This is based on the Western convention of reading from the top left of a page. This convention may change for other cultures, for instance, traditional Chinese writing is from top right and moving vertically down and then to the left. Such considerations may be accounted for when capturing news sources from other cultures. As stories age and become less important they tend to move down the page and to the right as they move down. Every website is designed differently and spaces reserved for advertising or for the display of other information need to be respected and in those cases the stories tend to flow around those areas. Generally speaking the selection convention from top to bottom and left to right works well as a first method of importance selection for stories.
By using natural language selection software for keyword matching, key words can be pulled out of the body text of a web document or story. Keywords can also be pulled from the story headlines. Many stories written for the internet have meta keywords as well and meta descriptions in their HTML code which can be pulled from the document and used by the present system. By doing these as well as other steps which are natural extensions of these steps, a comprehensive comparison of story keywords being used on the internet can be checked on a frequent basis to see which stories are trending at any given time. Using this method to derive key words from stories and comparing them to stories just breaking, the volume of stories that refer to the same or similar keywords can be quickly spotted and accessed for important trending. In this way, important and upward trending stories can be moved to the top of the importance queue and users can be immediately informed of important breaking news or information.
Yet another factor in determining importance is the number of impressions the story or the story subject matter (see natural language search method above) receives. Further, a change in the number of impressions per unit time can indicate a story in trending upwards or downwards.
Sharing and social "likes" can be used as another factor in the calculation of importance. As users within the present system read stories and are motivated to share those stories, they can share both within and outside of the system. Users can share via the many social sharing platforms as well as through email. Where when the users share, a link is sent via the system to their personal news feed or board on the selected service and when a friend clicks on that link they are taken within the system where the story originated from. Likewise with email the recipient can click the link and be taken to the present system to consume the information. A "like" tends to be a slightly weaker indication of importance, compared to sharing.
Commenting on a story is a strong indicator of importance due to the high level of engagement required; and can be used to determine the importance of a story. Additional metrics can be derived concerning story importance from any social type channel or other type of channel by deriving a read or unread state as the users browses through the stories.
Because the present system's capture tool searches websites for changes as often as once a minute, it is possible to stamp a time and date on a story when it first appears on a source and, by continuing to check the source, it is possible to know how long a story lasts on a page by noting the time and date of its last appearance on the site. By comparing the longevity of a story relative to other stories either from that source or combined with other sources it is possible to assign a value to that story that relates to longevity. As long as the URL remains the same it is assumed to be the same story. Sometimes, publishers will change the headline or header of a story that draws from the same URL. They do this from time to time throughout the course of the day or even several days to draw more interest or market various aspects of the story. Nevertheless, by virtue of the URL remaining constant, it is assumed to be the same story in spite of the changing headline of header. The value of longevity can be weighted based on many qualifications, such as the type of source or propensity of a source to be a prolific publisher. Stories that last a long time on a source that publishes frequently and from a wide variety of subjects such a news outlet may be weighted more highly than a story from a source that publishes very infrequently or writes about a very limited subject matter.
Longevity of a theme is different than longevity of a particular story. A theme can be described as a story about the same general subject or a more specific subject having key word matching, description matching, language based word matching, or concept matching. For instance, if a major storm is about to hit a region and a news source or many news sources publish many stories about that storm, and each of these stories has a separate destination link or URL, and each has a different header or heading, it is possible to know that they are all related to the same general or specific subject or theme through the aforementioned matching methods.
Since it is uncertain whether a user has actually read the story, it must be estimated that the user read the story to determine the number of implied story reads. The speed that a user reads can be derived through a number of methods from rate at which a story on a page is clicked through and the number of words or type of words present in the headline to the rate at which a user scrolls through a story or the time required to read a certain number and or type of words before they scroll. In this way the unique rate of consumption per word or time per word can be found. Additionally, by knowing relative complexity or length of a word extra weight (or time) can be placed on those words.
With this information it is possible to reasonably conclude if a user has read a headline in a certain period of pause time and before they have moved onto the next story. If in fact sufficient pause time has been spent on a story then the blue bar representing that story will be changed to gray, indicating that it has been read. If a user moves through a headline too quickly then it can remain blue showing that it is unread. In this way it can be know if the content has been consumed and weight can be added to that story in the overall analysis of importance.
Alternatively, a fixed time can be set for the average user' s read rate and if the story is paused sufficiently long to have been read by the average user (where time to read = average word read rate x the number of words in the headline of the story), then it will be marked as read. Otherwise, if they move too quickly through the stories, it will be marked as unread. Using a similar methodology as described above, a social feed graphical rating system is weight against how many forwards a story has plus the number of followers the user has and number of times the story has been favorited, these values are added together and placed on a 0 to 10 point scale when compared to current social feeds (or TWEETS) on the channel. In other words with the maximum score of 10 in a set of say 20 TWEETS, the TWEET with the highest rating among the set of 20 (although any set size can be used) will be given a maximun score of 10 and the others will be set relative to that. This gives relative weight to the TWEETS so that within a certain set the user knows which TWEETS are likely to be more important. Other metrics or available data may be used to augment or perform a similar rating system and it may include sample sets larger or smaller than the one used in this example.
As an example, in a sample set of three stories (story A, story B, and story C), several of the above factors or any other type of information may be used to determine the relative ranking of the three stories. The below example formulas are used to determine the story importance, which is then use to determine the height of the related status bar. Fl, F2, and F3 represent the three factors applied to calculate the story importance (SI) for each of the stories. Each used factor is given a weight or score, with some being weighed more heavily than others, such that some factors greatly affect the story importance while other have less effect.
FIA + F2A + F3A = SIA
FIB + F2B + F3B = SIB
Flc + F2C + F3c = SIC
Once the story importance has been calculated for each story by adding together or otherwise manipulating the weight of each factor, the story with the greatest score is used to set the maximum value of the scale, for example it can be scaled to 10 on an importance scale of 1 to 10. If SIA has the highest importance score, it will be scaled to 10. The importance scores of SIB and Sic will be determined relative to the score of SIA- If SIA is scaled to 10, then:
SIB Scaled = (SIB/ SIA)(10)
Sic Scaled = (Sic/ SIA)( 10)
Using the scaled importance scores of SIA Scaled = 10, and for example, S¾ Scaled = 5 and Sic Scaled = 7, three status bars would be displayed within the importance graph (50), with story A having a height of 10 units, story B having a height of 5 units, and story C having a height of 7 units. If story A is earliest in time and story C is most recent, then, in the status bar chart (78), the status bar associated with story A will be located leftmost, the status bar associated with story B will be located in the middle, and the status bar associated with story C will be located rightmost.
A web or database and social research tool is provided based on pre-selected keywords or user-selected keywords. The present system uses natural word processing algorithms to scan an article as well as its title to select key words which can be used to drive one or more platforms which aid in research or a broader understanding of a word, words or an article. Alternatively, keywords from the HTML of the article may also be used. These keywords can be submitted to
TWITTER (for example) and TWEETS relevant to those key words are returned via the TWITTER API (application programming interface). Filters can then be applied to the API so that one or a combination of the following can be used to return a better quality result, the filters including one or more of specific language results only (such as English), recent TWEETS, popular TWEETS, real-time TWEETS, and ignore RE- TWEETS. Since the present system provides a web crawling and scraping tool, it is able to create a search result on TWITTER links that is more similar to the way a channel looks, where an image is found that best represents the search and a title is place below the image which can be the first part of the search result. This augments the TWITTER results with more information than would otherwise be immediately available in TWITTER. This would also help in absorbing the meaning of the TWEET, as they can often be too brief. Again clicking the modified link with an image and description would cause the web browser to open a tab and navigate to that selected site or a frame can be opened and the information consumed without leaving the system environment.
Similarly web research is launched with the presentation of a key word or key words. Web research can be driven by utilizing a search engine API. Or, alternatively, since the present system receives input in the form of keywords from users in describing the content they desire it is highly likely that through a simple key word match or a more complex natural language matching process against articles, images, and data that the present system has already captured or indexed, extremely relevant search results can be found. The present system can also employ a dictionary, encyclopedia or other research resource API to augment these results.
The present system provides a tool to allow the user to select any word within the body of the text of the article they are reading or in the headline and web research function will automatically query that word for search results. This makes extremely fast research possible. Since most searches within a search engine are performed when a user is already engaged on the internet and quite often on something like reading and article, it is extremely valuable to have such a research tool at the disposal of the user. As mentioned above, if the article within the source does not have an associated image, meta keywords or natural language processing software may be used to find the keywords that should be associated with a story by processing the stories headline and or the body of the text, and searching the system' s database or the web for a related image. When a story on a subject that is indexed and retrieved with its meta data such as keywords and or description and lacks an image, the keywords and or description can be compared to other stories in the system database with the same or similar keywords and or description and an image match from the database or from the web can be assigned and used by the story missing an image to deliver a more visual experience for the user.
The present system may track when a story appears on a crawled site or publication, with a time and date, how long a story has been present on a page, and when a story is removed from a page to determine the importance of a story or other related characteristic. Because the present system indexes sites frequently and is able to determine (in some cases as frequently as every 60 seconds) the status of a story, age of a story after it first appeared in a site and through checking how long a story remains on a publishers page these metrics can be collected and used to create the importance graph (50) for further story relevance clarification. A publisher can include the above described time data as part of a stories meta data or a sites metadata, which can be collected and used similarly by the present system.
Using the present system's captured metrics, information about how long it has been since a story appeared on the publishers website can be conveyed to a user. This is meaningful because it implies importance. If it is no longer display on a publishers page it has probably fallen in importance. Indeed this information can also be used in the importance graph (50) to convey importance. Whether a story is currently active combined with ordinal position on a page, importance can be derived as a story moves down on a page as it ages over time. Various rates of movement down a page could mean different things. For instance if a story moves quickly down a page it may mean that its significance is diminishing quickly. If a story remains at the top position of a page for a long time and then moves slowly down the page this means that a story has longevity and importance. Various permutations of position and time can be contemplated to derive meaning in importance of a story.
All of this information can be captured about various publishers of information for comparative evaluations concerning which publishers provide the best and most relevant information and information that lives longest in terms of relevance. This data can be compiled to show how two or more publishers of ostensibly the same story can experience two different results or how there are similarities in story trends, user reading of those stories. Best architecture of a site can be derived as when a story moves down a page or from one position to the next there may be a sudden or gradual increase of consumption of that story. This may help website designers optimized story positioning.
If demographic data of a user is known then how information is consumed at various sites can be related to all of the above collected data points and best practices can be derived.
Channels can be made from sources and stories which match keywords enter by a user during the channel creation process. Since the present system has crawled, indexed, and saved keywords associated with sources, stories and images, it is possible to create, as requested by a user, a channel(s) comprised entirely or partially of stories, articles or images that are matched according to these keywords or any other appropriately executed matching or association method or means. In this way, quick and visual searches and research can be completed and broader information consumed and cross referenced with web research and or TWITTER Reaction of the like.
While particular forms of the invention have been illustrated and described, it will also be apparent to those skilled in the art that various modifications can be made without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Accordingly, it is not intended that the invention be limited except by the claims.