Web-based system and method for archiving and searching participant-based internet text sources for customer lead data
AssigneeiNetProfit, Inc.
InventorsJohn C. Seibel, Yu Feng, Robert L. Foster
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A text mining system for collecting business intelligence about a client, as well as for identifying prospective customers of the client, for use in a lead generation system accessible by the client via the Internet. The text mining system has various components, including a data acquisition process that extracts textual data from various Internet sources, a database for storing the extracted data, a text mining server that executes query-based searches of the database, and an output repository. A web server provides client access to the repository, and to the mining server.
Claims18
A text mining system that permits an application service provider to provide data identifying prospective customers of a product or service provided by a product/service provider, comprising:
- a data acquisition process for extracting text documents from unstructured Internet discussion sites selected from the group consisting of:
- newsgroups, discussion forums, and mailing lists;
- wherein each discussion site comprises a collection of text documents generated by participants of the discussion site and broadcasted to multiple participants of the discussion site;
- an archive database for storing the extracted text documents;
- a text mining server for receiving queries from the product/service provider, each query representing a request for information about participants who are discussing a specified product or service;
- wherein the text mining server responds to each query by intruding into the Internet discussion site independently of, and without activation by the participants of the discussion site;
- wherein the text mining server is further operable to analyze data in the database, to provide the product/service provider with text mining outputs representing themes extracted from the data, and a link to at least one document stored in the database that contains information identifying a prospective customer who is discussing the product or service;
- and
- a web server for providing access to the text mining server via a web browser and the Internet, such that the product/service provider may interact with the text mining server to make the requests on line via the Internet and to receive the outputs generated by the text mining server;
- wherein the at least one link enables the product/service provider to access a text document from the archive database via the web browser.
A method, performed by an information service provider, for providing data identifying prospective customers of a product or service provided by a product/service provider, comprising the steps of:
- extracting text documents from at least one unstructured Internet discussion site selected from the group consisting of:
- newsgroups, discussion forums, and mailing lists;
- wherein the each discussion site comprises a collection of text documents generated by participants of the discussion site and broadcasted among multiple participants of the discussion site;
- storing the extracted text documents in an archive database;
- receiving a query from the product/service provider, via a web browser and a text mining server, the query representing a request for information about participants of the text sources who are discussing a specified product or service;
- using the text mining server to respond to the query independently of, and without activation by the participants;
- using the text mining server to analyze data in the archive database to satisfy the query, thereby providing the product/service provider with text mining output representing a theme extracted from the data, and a link to at least one document containing information identifying a prospective customer who is discussing the product or service;
- and
- delivering to the product/service provider, via a web browser, a query response to the product/service provider, the query response containing the text mining output and the link to the document.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.