Aggregation, Organization and Provision of Professional and Social Information

A method for performing a search for information pertaining to a search subject, comprising:

• receiving a name of a person;
• receiving a value indicative of a desired level along a scale from social information to professional information;
• performing a search through one or more information sources based on the received name of the person;
• identifying a plurality of personal candidates from results of the performed search and automatically linking profiles of the same person in different search domains;
• selecting a search subject from among the identified plurality of candidates based on user input;
• characterizing the results of the search that pertain to the selected search subject along a scale from social information to professional information based on a context in which each item of search results is found within, wherein a nature of the context is classified by ontological analysis;
• filtering the results of the search that pertain to the selected search subject based on the received value indicative of the desired level along the scale from social information to professional information and the characterization of each item of results found;
• and
• displaying the filtered search results.

A method for performing a search for information pertaining to a search subject, comprising:

• characterizing each of a plurality of information sources along a scale from social information to professional information;
• receiving a name of a person;
• receiving a value indicative of a desired level along a scale from social information to professional information;
• performing a search through the plurality of information sources based on the received name of the person;
• identifying a plurality of personal candidates from results of the performed search and automatically linking profiles of the same person in different search domains;
• selecting a search subject from among the identified plurality of candidates based on user input;
• characterizing the results of the search that pertain to the selected search subject along a scale from social information to professional information based the characterization of the information source that each item of search results is found within;
• filtering the results of the search that pertain to the selected search subject based on the received value indicative of the desired level along the scale from social information to professional information and the characterization of the search results;
• and
• displaying the filtered search results.

A system for performing a search for information pertaining to a search subject, comprising:

• a crawler server for crawling one or more information sources for information pertaining to one or more persons of interest and assigning each found item of information a serial number representing a particular search subject and value that is indicative of how social and how professional the item of information is;
• an information database for storing each item of information along with its corresponding search subject serial number and value;
• and
• a web server for providing a search interface for allowing a user to perform a search for information pertaining to a desired search subject from among the information stored in the information database, wherein search results from the user's search is filtered according to the value of each item of information and a value indicative of a desired level along a scale from social information to professional information provided by the user.

A computer program product for performing a search for information pertaining to a search subject, said computer program product comprising:

• a computer readable storage medium;
• program instructions for receiving a name of a person;
• program instructions for receiving a value indicative of a desired level along a scale from social information to professional information;
• program instructions for performing a search for the received name using a information database storing items of information crawled from one or more information sources along with corresponding search subject name data and value that is indicative of how social and how professional the item of information is;
• program instructions for identifying a plurality of personal candidates from results of the performed search;
• program instructions for selecting a search subject from among the identified plurality of candidates based on user input;
• program instructions for filtering the results of the search that pertain to the selected search subject based on the received value indicative of the desired level along the scale from social information to professional information;
• and
• program instructions for displaying the filtered search results,
• wherein the program instructions are stored on said computer readable storage medium.