{
  "patent_number": "US 6370526",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "Smart Ranking of Emails and Files Based on How You Click",
  "original_title": "Self-adaptive method and system for providing a user-preferred ranking order of object sets",
  "summary": "IBM's 1999 patent on automatically sorting lists of items, like emails, by watching which ones you click first and updating a mathematical model of your preferences in the background.",
  "what_it_does": "The system observes the order in which a user accesses a first set of objects, such as opening emails in an inbox, and compares this sequence to an 'access hypothesis'—a baseline expectation of how the user would normally browse them (Claim 1). If the user deviates from this baseline (for example, skipping the top three emails to click a receipt further down), the system adapts a 'preference model' (Claim 1). It does this by applying a 'bonus value' to the features of the early-accessed item (Claim 4) and a 'penalty value' to the skipped items (Claim 9). These updated weights, stored in feature vectors, are then used to calculate preferences and re-rank a second set of incoming items (Claim 1).",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "Does not cover ranking systems that rely purely on explicit user feedback, such as star ratings, likes, or manual folder sorting.",
    "Does not cover static ranking systems that do not update their underlying preference models dynamically based on user behavior.",
    "Does not cover systems where the baseline expectation (access hypothesis) is not compared against the actual sequence of user interactions.",
    "Does not cover ranking methods that do not use feature vectors to represent the attributes of the items being sorted."
  ],
  "filed": "1999-05-18",
  "granted": "2002-04-09",
  "expires": "2019-05-18",
  "status": "expired",
  "holder": "International Business Machines Corp",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/international-business-machines-corp",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Roland Seiffert",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/roland-seiffert"
    },
    {
      "name": "Ramakrishnan Srikant",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/ramakrishnan-srikant"
    },
    {
      "name": "Andreas Arning",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/andreas-arning"
    },
    {
      "name": "Rakesh Agrawal",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/rakesh-agrawal"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 135,
  "tags": [
    "software",
    "consumer_electronics",
    "ecommerce"
  ],
  "abstract": "A method and system for presenting a group of objects in a ranking order. Objects are ranked according to user preferences by first observing the access order of a related group of objects in relation to a predetermined access hypothesis. A user preference model is then adapted to correspond to any deviations between the access order and the access hypothesis for the related group of objects. Next, object preferences are calculated for each of the objects to be ranked according to the preference model. The group of objects is then presented to the user in an order corresponding to the calculated object preferences. The preference model is adaptively updated, unbeknownst to the user, in the normal course of accessing the presented objects.",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/6370526/google-adwords-pay-per-click",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/6370526/google-adwords-pay-per-click/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US6370526",
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}