Patent Application
20130080908
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to interactive user tools on a distributed communication network, such as the Internet. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for enabling users of content on a distributed communication network to collectively indicate the degree of helpfulness or usefulness of individual items of contents, such as for example reviews of commercially available products and/or services, usenet postings, news articles, etc., by interactively voting or indicating that particular items of content were helpful or otherwise valuable to the user. Subsequent users then are able to sort retrieved items of content by degree of helpfulness or usefulness according to the number of previous users who have indicated that the individual items of content were helpful or otherwise valuable.
2. Background and Related Art
It is generally known in the art to survey consumers regarding the quality of particular products and/or services, and to publish or advertise the results of the survey. Recently, with the rapid technological advancement of the Internet, it has become possible for individual consumers to provide narrative reviews of products and/or services, in addition to standardized scaled ratings. Such reviews can be stored in a server database and retrieved and displayed to users (clients) in response to search queries using known search engines.
As the number of individual consumers participating in on-line product ratings and posting product reviews continues to grow, so does the amount of information available for subsequent users to evaluate.
In addition to consumer reviews or ratings of products and services, it is possible to retrieve a very large of amount of information from the Internet relating to any subject at all. For example, information can be retrieved in the form of usenet postings, professional reviews, news articles, on-line catalogs, video and audio cups, etc.
Consequently, there exists a need in the art to provide a methodology by which users may indicate the particular helpfulness or usefulness of certain individual items of content, whereby subsequent users will be ante to sort available reviews by the degree of indicated helpfulness or usefulness, and thereby reduce the amount of information for the user to evaluate, based on the prior experience of other users.
The document relates generally to methods and systems that fulfill the existing need in the art as described above, by providing an interactive user tool on a distributed communication network, whereby a user of an on-line content database can provide an indication that a particular review has been helpful or otherwise valuable to the user in assessing the quality of the content, e.g., in the case of a product review, in determining whether to purchase or use the reviewed product or service. A tally of such indications is stored in a database associated with the content, and is displayed to subsequent users who retrieve or otherwise view the content.
This section is intended to provide an overview of subject matter of the present patent application. It is not intended to provide an exclusive or exhaustive explanation of the invention. The detailed description is included to provide further information about the present patent application.
The invention will be described in detail with reference to the following drawings in which:
A number of scaled numerical ratings 102 based on different criteria are provided for the product, in both graphical and numerical form. In addition to the numerical scaled ratings, the available consumer reviews for the product are indicated in review label 104. In the example, 468 consumer reviews have been posted for the product and stored in the database. One of the stored reviews 106 is displayed at the bottom of the screen. To the right of the review, an indication 112 is provided of the number of users who have found the displayed review helpful. An interactive element or icon 110 is provided adjacent to the displayed review, which enables a user to indicate whether she finds the review helpful by clicking on the element 110 with a pointing device, as is well known in the art.
Once the user's indication with respect to the displayed review has been received and counted, a pop-up window can be displayed on the user's display screen, as shown for example in
As shown in
At step 410, a previously registered user logs on to the server by entering her user name and password in appropriate fields, and the user is then returned to the product page or review page from which she clicked on the “helpful” element. An unregistered user will click a register element in the pop-up window at step 412, whereby the user will be directed to a register page 414. The unregistered user enters her personal information into the appropriate fields in the register page, and submits the information at step 416, whereby the user is successfully registered and logged in, and is brought back to the product or review page where the user again clicks the “helpful” element, which now tallies the indication.
In an alternative embodiment, once a user has been successfully logged in, the user can be brought directly to step 418 (described below) without being required to again click the “helpful” element.
Once the use is logged on to the server as a registered user, at step 418 previously stored user data is checked to determine whether that user has already submitted an indication for a particular review as being helpful. This step prevents users from submitting such indication more than once, and thus prevents the artificial inflation of the appearance of helpfulness of reviews. If it is determined that the user has already submitted an indication, at step 422 a pop-up window as shown in
If the user has not already submitted an indication fur the review, at step 420 the user's indication is received and counted, and a pop-up window as shown in
As shown in
According to a further aspect of the invention, a reviewer's “hall of fame” page may be provided, which lists the individual users who have received the most “helpful” indications for reviews they have written. In this way, subsequent users may view the reviewers with the highest number of helpful indications on the “hall of fame” page. This information then may be used by the user in a search, such as by searching for all reviews written by a particular reviewer, or by adding the reviewer's name to a search string for a particular product.
The invention having been thus described, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art that the same may be varied. in many ways without departing from the spirit and scope of the inventions. For example, while the invention has been described with respect to rating reviews or other content as to “helpfulness,” it is possible to rate the same on alternative characteristics such as writing style, wit or another subjective criterion, or on multiple subjective criteria. All such modifications are intended to be encompassed by the following claims.
This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/731,019, filed Dec. 7, 2000, which claims the benefit under 35 U.S.C. 119(e) of the filing date of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 60/170,362, filed Dec. 31, 1999, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60170362 | Dec 1999 | US |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 09731019 | Dec 2000 | US |
| Child | 13683514 | US |
