US 7,007,074 B2Granted

Targeted advertisements using time-dependent key search terms

AssigneeYahoo! Inc.

InventorMichael Radwin

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Abstract

An advertisement generation system presents a time-dependent advertisement to a user based upon to a search term of a search query during a period of time via a communication network The system includes a search engine coupled to a web server for receiving the search query and for presenting a search results page. The search results page is accompanied with an immediate advertisement. In one embodiment, the system includes an advertisement repository to store data representing a plurality of advertisements and includes the immediate advertisement and the time-dependent advertisement. Also, the system includes a user profiler configured to communicate a plurality of search characteristics and includes a data structure to store the search characteristics. Lastly, an advertisement server is included to provide to the web server the immediate advertisement with an associated search results page and the time-dependent advertisement with a web page presented after the display of the search results page, until a period of time expires.

Claims28

Dependent claims

In a computer system that generates hypertext pages, or representations thereof, for presentation to users at user computing devices, wherein the hypertext pages include at least references to advertisements that are to be displayed on the user computing devices along with other portions of the hypertext pages and wherein the advertisements are stored in electronic form, a method for presenting advertisements to a user by presenting a hypertext page for display on at a corresponding user computing device, wherein the advertisements are selected from a plurality of advertisements, the method comprising:

accepting a first set of search terms at the computer system from the user, directly or indirectly;
determining a search result based upon the first set of search terms;
storing a representation of at least part of the first set of search terms such that it is electronically accessible to the computer system;
sending a user computing device a first search result page representing a search result resulting from a search using at least a part of the stored representation, the first search result page including an immediate advertisement selected from the electronically stored advertisements based on one or both of the first set of search terms and at least a part of the stored representation;
selecting a future advertisement from the electronically stored advertisements based on at least the stored representations of the first set of search terms and on at least an approximation of a time difference between a time of display of the first search result page and a display time for a later page;
and
presenting, at the user computing device, the future advertisement to the user as part of the later page presented at the user computing device subsequent to the viewing of the first search result page.

4 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.