Effective product recommendation using the real-time web

Abstract

A method for generating product recommendations comprises analyzing a database of messages, comprising a set of messages posted by users of a micro-blogging service to generate a user index and a product index. The user index comprises for each of a plurality of users of the system, a ranked set of terms included by the user in their posted messages. The product index comprises for each product which is to be potentially recommended, a ranked set of terms derived from messages posted by users and referencing the product. Responsive to a query identifying a user, the user index for the user is compared to the product indices to return a limited set of product identifiers corresponding to product indices most similar to the user index. The set of product identifiers are provided as recommendations to a service provider.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.