Forum Moderators: goodroi
The invention claimed is:
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. Google Patents Method For Analyzing Conversations In Social Media [patft.uspto.gov]
