WO2001061556A2

WO2001061556A2 - Communicating information over an internet

Info

Publication number: WO2001061556A2
Application number: PCT/GB2001/000582
Authority: WO
Inventors: John Snyder; Charles Richard Neil Hull
Original assignee: Webtop.Com Limited
Priority date: 2000-02-15
Filing date: 2001-02-14
Publication date: 2001-08-23
Also published as: AU3209101A; WO2001061556A3

Abstract

Web pages have banner advertisements included therein that are configured to provide a user with substantially more than merely a connection to a particular web address. A remote server has a search engine capability. A user selects a page of information from an information service provider and the service provider provides said selected page of information with an embedded invitation to seek new information of a particular information type. On detecting that a user has expressed an interest in the new information, the user-computer contacts the remote server to provide further information in the form of a search query. The remote server performs a searching operation to identify locations of web pages that may be of interest. The server returns these details to the requesting user. The search terms are specified in the banner advertisement, the nature of the returned results will change over time as new relevant web pages become available and old web pages are removed.

Description

Communicating Information Over an Internet

Background of the Invention

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to communicating information over an internet, wherein a page of information includes an invitation to a user to seek new information of a particular type.

2. Description of the Related Art

Private internets, the Internet and in particular the provision of the world wide web protocols implemented over the Internet have facilitated a wide distribution of information to users throughout the world. Not long after the world wide web had been made available for public use, it was appreciated that it could be used as a powerful advertising medium.

Furthermore, the inclusion of advertisements in web pages has facilitated the provision of many services that are made available without direct charge to users, on the basis that they may be attracted to advertisement which may then in turn result in sales being generated for a particular advertiser. Revenue for service providers could then be generated via a third party arranged to make advertising material available and to determine when the material has actually been viewed by a user. Thus, each of these interactions may be identified as a hit and a charge may be made on a per hit basis.

After a user makes a hit in this way, it is known for the user to be presented with a website generated by the advertiser. It has been found recently that many users do not consider this to be a particularly attractive feature and that the number of advertisement hits is tending to diminish. Consequently, advertising budgets have been directed away from advertising of this type and many service providers have been forced to adapt their business plans in anticipation of a reduced level of advertising income compared to their original expectations. Efforts have been made to make web advertising more attractive and thereby increase the likelihood of a user making a hit and thereby wishing to seek further information from the advertiser of a particular type. It is known to include complex scripting languages within advertisements of this type, including those written in Java Script. Thus, advertisements may animate and it is known to supply the user with a modest game within the advert before the advertising material is supplied. A problem with advertisements of this type is that the novelty of such devices is often of limited value. Furthermore, there is an increasing tendency for the ability to read executable scripts to be disabled for security reasons. Consequently, complex advertisements with sophisticated scripting routines have not proved to be substantially more attractive than conventional advertisements that merely provide a web page location.

Summary of the Invention According to a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided apparatus for communicating information over an internet, comprising at least one user computer; an inter-network for providing communication between a plurality of computer systems; at least one information service provider; and a remote server having a search engine capability, wherein a user selects a page of information from said information service provider; said service provider provides said selected page of information with an embedded invitation to seek new information of a particular information type; said user computer includes detection means for detecting that a user has expressed an interest in said new information; said user computer contacts said remote server to provide further information in the form of a search query; said remote server performs a searching operation to identify the location of at least one internet site of interest; and said remote server returns details of said at least one identified location back to said user.

In a preferred embodiment, the remote server performs the searching operation using a search engine and said search engine performs said search in response to pre-programmed search terms. According to a second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method of communicating information over an internet, wherein a page of information includes an invitation to a user to seek new information of a particular type, comprising the steps of detecting that a user has expressed an interest in said new information; contacting a remote server for further information; performing a searching operation at said server to identify the location of at least one internet site of interest; and returning details of said identified locations back to said user.

Brief Description of the Drawings Figure 1 shows an environment for the communication of information, using the Internet;

Figure 2 shows known HTML code for producing banner advertisements;

Figure 3 shows HTML code used to facilitate the present invention; Figure 4 summarises components of the computer system shown in

Figure 1, including a memory;

Figure 5 details contents of the memory shown in Figure 4, including a search application;

Figure 6 illustrates operations performed by the computer system shown in Figure 1;

Figure 7 details the search engine shown in Figure 1, including a computer and a search engine database;

Figure 8 details the computer shown in Figure 7, including a memory;

Figure 9 details contents of the memory shown in Figure 8, including an indexer application and a search application;

Figures 10 and 11 detail steps performed by the indexer application shown in Figure 9, including a step of applying a stemming algorithm and a step of updating postings;

Figures 12 and 13 illustrate the effects of the stemming algorithm used in Figure 10;

Figure 14 illustrates the use of the stemming algorithm used in Figure 10;

Figure 15 illustrates the postings that are updated in Figure 10;

Figure 16 illustrates additional data that is used to update the database shown in Figure 7;

Figures 17 and 18 detail equations used by the search engine shown in Figure 7;

Figure 19 details steps performed by the search application shown in Figure 9, including a step of calculating a document weight and a step of transmitting a list of documents;

Figures 20 and 21 detail equations that may be used in the calculation step shown in Figure 19; and

Figure 22 illustrates the results displayed on the user's monitor in response to the step of transmitting a list of documents shown in Figure 19. Detailed Description of The Preferred Embodiment

The invention will now be described by way of example only with reference to the accompanying drawings. An environment for the communication of information, using the

Internet, is shown in Figure 1. A user's computer 101 is connected to the Internet 102 via a communications channel 103. The user's computer 101 is connected to interface devices, including a keyboard 104, a mouse 105 and a visual display unit 106. The computer 101 in combination with its interface devices will be referred to collectively as the user's computer system 107.

At the user's computer system 107 a page of information 108 is being displayed on monitor 106. This page of information includes an invitation 109 to the user to seek new information of a particular type. Specifically, the invitation may be considered as an advertisement inviting the user to seek more information relating to a particular product or service produced by a particular manufacturer or service provider. In addition, the page 108 includes specific information 109 previously selected by the user.

The user may express an interest in the new information in response to the invitation by operating the mouse 105 so as to place the cursor in the position of the displayed invitation 109 and then operate a mouse button, usually referred to as a "clicking" operation which is then detected by browser software executing on the computer 101. Previously, a user will have issued a universal resource locator (URL) resulting in an HTML encoded version of the displayed information 106 being provided by an information provider 121. When fabricating pages for selection in this way, the information provider embeds the invitation 109 within the displayed page 108, in combination with the selected information 109. On detecting that the information has been clicked, browser software executing on computer 101 contacts a remote server 131. Thus, it should be appreciated that responding to the invitation 109 does not result in a communication back to the information provider 121 but instead results in a communication with remote server 131.

At remote server 131, the incoming request from user system 107 is interpreted at 132 whereafter a searching operation is performed 133 to identify the location of at least one internet site of interest to the user. Internet sites of interest are identified at 133 and then formatted at 134 so as to return details of the identified locations back to the user.

Thus, in response to responding to the information, which would often take the form of an advertisement for a particular product, the user receives at least one, but more often many, internet locations that relate to the particular information type that has been identified at 109. Thus, in response to receiving a particular internet site, often taking the form of a home page for a particular manufacturer, the user is presented with a selection of internet sites that may be of interest and relate to the topic that has been identified to the user by the invitation. In this way, responding to the advertisement results in information being supplied back to the user that would often be of greater interest and benefit when compared to a single internet page. The advertisement provides substantially more than a single internet page and is in this way performing what is perceived to be a relatively active operation. In this way, the active advertisements are seen as substantially more beneficial to a user and as such there is a greater likelihood that a user would be prompted to respond, ie click, to the invitation, thereby creating user interest in the advertised product or service and creating a hit for the information provider. Invitations 109 of the type shown in Figure 1 are often referred to as "banner" and usually consist simply of an image, usually in GIF format, hiding a hyperlink to an advertiser's website. Thus, if a user clicks on a banner showing a picture of a particular product, the user is usually taken to the manufacturers website. Often, this is not perceived by users as being particular attractive, to the extent that they often quickly return back to their page of interest or, having had poor experiences in the past, they will avoid advertisements of this type altogether. The purpose of the present invention is, from the user's perspective, to provide more functionality and to increase the desirability of actually clicking on these invitations or advertisements in the first place. From the advertiser's point of view, it is desirable to increase the number of users who respond to the invitation and, in addition, once having responded to the invitation, it is preferable to retain user interest in the product being advertised for as long as possible. Maintaining contact with the advertised topic is sometimes referred to in the art as the "stickiness" of the material being advertised.

An example of HTML code used to produce a banner advertisement is shown in Figure 1; for the sake clarity, formatting tags are not shown. H ref tag 201 defines the URL that is loaded when the user clicks on the invitation 109. The IMG tag 202 specifies where the displayed image is obtained from and the ALT tag 203 specifies what to display if the graphic that should have been received in response to tag 202, cannot be shown for some reason.

In the preferred embodiment of the present invention, the H ref tag 201 is replaced by tag 301 shown in Figure 3. As an alternative to merely providing a link to a particular website, a search engine is instructed to perform a search and to retain a list of websites that are relevant to the particular product or service brought to the attention of the user. In this example, the search engine webtop.com 302 is instructed, searching service provided by the present applicant. The question mark 303 at the end of the first line is a command to the effect that information is required to be returned. The returned information is generated in response to the query command of the second line. The substance of the query command has been shown in emboldened font at 304 and in a real application, this would take the form of a real manufacturer followed by an identification of a real product model or service type. In this example, further limitations are placed in the query to the effect that only .uk domain names are to be supplied and only publications in the English language are to be supplied.

Further restrictions may be placed on the query. Thus, for example, if the product being advertised is a motor car, such as the name of the manufacturer is identified followed by the name of a specific model, further limitations may include specific engine capacities, limited editions or colour ranges etc.

The nature of the HTML shown in Figure 3 is such as to be as standard as possible such that it will work on all commercially available browsers. Furthermore, it does not fall foul of any security issues associated with scripting languages. The webtop server has been configured to respond to queries of this type and it is possible for results to be obtained by issuing a query of this type shown in Figure 3 directly via any internet connection.

As an alternative to providing a conventional link, of the type illustrated in Figure 2, the search query shown in Figure 3 provides search results of the type that could be obtained by a user using more conventional searching techniques. The application of this approach is therefore particularly attractive for advertisers that realise that a user will almost certainly search the Internet anyway and then make a selection based upon the information considered. This approach to placing a particular manufacturer and a particular product or service at the disposal of a user may be emphasised in slogans associated with an advertisement. For example, the advertisement could include a slogan such as "Widget Limited make the best widgets in the world. Don't believe us! Click here to search the Internet using one of the world's biggest search engines and find out for yourselves".

User's computer 101 is detailed in Figure 4. The computer is a standard PC comprising a central processing unit (CPU) 401 , such as a Pentium II or equivalent processor. This is connected via data and address buses to memory devices 402, comprising sixty-four megabytes of dynamic

RAM. A hard disk drive 403 provides non-volatile high capacity storage for programs and data. A graphics card 404 receives commands from the CPU 401 resulting in the update and refresh of images displayed on the monitor 301. A keyboard interface 405 provides connectivity to the user's keyboard 303, and a serial I/O circuit 406 receives data from the user's mouse 302. A modem 407 provides electrical connectivity to the Internet 102.

The contents of the computer's memory 402 shown in Figure 4 are detailed in Figure 5. An operating system 501 provides instructions for common functionality, such as connection to networks, a graphical user environment and so on. A suitable operating system is Windows 98. In addition to the operating system are application instructions for a file manager 502, the email application 305 shown in Figure 3, a word processor 504, the search application 307 and a web browser 505. The remainder of the computer's memory 402 is either empty or used for data 506, such as disk data that has been cached, or data associated with the applications and/or the operating system 501.

Operations performed by computer system 107 are illustrated in Figure 6. At step 601 , the computer system is connected to the Internet and at step 602 a web browsing program is loaded. At step 603 the user is invited to locate a new page such that at step 604 a URL is issued. At step 605 the received page is displayed on VDU 106, including the embedded invitation 109.

At step 606 the user clicks on the invitation or advertisement 109 such that at step 607 the search command shown in Figure 3 is submitted to remote server 131. At step 608 locations found by remote server 131 are received by computer system 107 and displayed. The user is invited to select a displayed URL such that at step 610 a

URL is sent and at step 611 receive page information is displayed.

At step 611 , a further URL may be selected at step 609 or a new page may be selected at step 603. Ultimately, no further pages will be required, the question asked at step 603 will be answered in the negative and the browser will be closed at step 612.

The search engine 133 shown in Figure 1 is detailed in Figure 7. A modem and router apparatus 701 facilitates connectivity between the Internet 107 and the various components of the search engine 123. These include two terminals 702 and 703 for controlling and configuring the search engine. A Probabilistic IR System 308 comprises a cluster of network- connected computers 704 to 711. Depending on the anticipated number of users requiring simultaneous access to the search engine, the number of computers 704 to 711 in the cluster may be increased or decreased. The search engine database 309 comprises an array of high capacity hard disk drives 714 and 715, the number of which be increased to satisfy storage requirements.

A computer 704 of the type used in the cluster shown in Figure 7 is detailed in Figure 8. A Pentium III central processing unit 801 processes instructions and communicates with two hundred and fifty-six megabytes of dynamic RAM 802. A hard disk drive 803 includes non-volatile storage for instructions and data. A local network interface 804 facilitates communication with the modem and router 701 , and the two terminals 702 and 703.

The contents of the memory 802 shown in Figure 8 ate detailed in Figure 9. An operating system 901 provides common system instructions for the computer, such as disk file system access, network communications and process and memory management. A suitable operating system is the

Linux operating system. An Apache web server application 902 supplies web pages on demand from remote Internet users who are connected to the computer 704 via the router 701. The web server application also interacts with other applications, in order to update web pages interactively with remotely-connected users. An indexer application has the function of exploring the world wide web, identifying new documents, storing information about new documents on the search engine's database 309. The indexer application 903 constructs and maintains the large volume of search engine data that will be interrogated whenever user-selected text 306 is supplied to the search engine 123 as a query. A search application

904 comprises the instructions that are executed whenever user-selected text is received from as user in the form of a query. A database 905 includes structured data relating to documents found by the indexer application 903 on the world wide web. It will be appreciated that the volume of data required to represent all indexed documents is enormous, and this will be stored in dedicated high-capacity hard disk storage 714 and 715. The database 905 contains indexing data to facilitate fast access to commonly required search engine data. System data 906 includes configuration and other data for the operating system 901 and applications 902, 903 and 904.

The indexer application 903 runs as a background task on the computer 704. Only one or a few of the computers 704 to 711 in the cluster may be actively engaged in indexing, once the main search engine database 309 has been established. Also, it is possible that computers in the cluster may be separately assigned to indexing and searching. A generic computer, configured to run both processes, is used in this example.

The steps performed by the indexer application 902 shown in Figure 9 are detailed in Figure 10. At step 1001 a new document is identified on the world wide web. At step 1002, the new document is downloaded for further processing. At step 1003 the language of the document, such as French, German or English, is identified. This identification is required for step 1004, where a stemming algorithm, appropriate to the language of the document, is applied. At step 1005 postings are updated on the search engine database 309. Substantially in parallel with operations carried out in Figure 10, the indexer may additionally perform the steps shown in Figure 11. These steps select each web document listed in the database 309, and check to see if it is still accessible on the web. At step 1101 the next document indexed by the database is selected. At step 1102 a question is asked as to whether the document still exists on the web. If answered in the affirmative, control is directed to step 1101. Alternatively, if the document is no longer available, control is directed to step 1103. At step 1103, postings relevant to the document are deleted and the database 309 is updated. Thereafter, control is directed to step 1101. A stemming algorithm takes as its premise the idea that words having identical first portions but different endings, nevertheless have similar meanings. This is true of many Indo-European languages. Figure 12 shows examples of the effects of a stemming algorithm for the English language. The five variants of the word "connection" are stemmed to

"connect". It is not necessary for the stemmed version to be a correct English word. This is shown in the remaining examples in Figure 12, such as "revival" -> "reviv", and so on. A suitable stemming algorithm for the English language is the Porter Stemming Algorithm, described in "An algorithm for suffix stripping" by M.F. Porter, published in Program, 14 no.3, pp 130-137, July 1980, presently available at http: //open. muscat.co.uk/ developer/ docs/ porterstem.html. Stemming algorithms have been developed for languages other than English and are also available from this site. The stemming algorithm is applied to the document data at step

1004, thus translating all the words it contains into a stemmed form. In addition to stemming, the algorithm may stop certain extremely common words that contain little meaning. A selection of stop words is shown in Figure 13. The stemmed form of the document ensures that similar words with similar meanings are considered, as far as the probabilistic retrieval system is concerned, identical. The stemming algorithm introduces a degree of natural language understanding into the system with very little computational overhead.

The context of the stemming algorithm applied at step 1004 is summarised in Figure 14. A document, Dx, is supplied to the stemming algorithm, and this results in words being stemmed, or occasionally stopped. A list of unique words is generated. Each unique word considered a term, and each term, ta, tb and tc, has associated with it a within document frequency (wdf), and within document position (wdp) data comprising a list of word positions in the originating document where the term occurs. For example, if the word "relativity" occurs at word positions five and fifty in the original document, the term "relativ" will have an associated wdf of two, and wdp data values of five and fifty.

The search engine's database 309 includes a set of postings, each of which comprises a link between a term and a document. A short set of postings is illustrated in Figure 15. In this Figure, term ta is posted to document Dx. Along with this posting are the wdf and wdp data. Term tb also has a posting to document Dx, and this posting has its own unique wdf and wdp data.

When a new document is analysed into terms, postings such as those illustrated in Figure 15 are updated on the search engine database 309. They contain the essential data about a document that is needed in order to facilitate document retrieval. Rather than storing the entire original document in the database, a pointer incorporating the document's URL is used. The database 309 itself is implemented in a highly optimised manner, so that the incredibly large number of documents it references does not result in impossible storage requirements. Implementation of a database of this type is known in the art of web server technology.

In addition to the postings shown in Figure 15, the database 309 includes normalised document length (ndl) data associated with each document, and a URL containing the address of the document on the world wide web. An example of these is shown in Figure 16. The normalised document length is calculated as being the ratio of the document's length in words, divided by the average length of all documents that are accessible via the database 309. Thus small documents have a value less than one, large documents greater than one, and an average length document an ndl of exactly one. The data structures illustrated in Figure 15 and Figure 16 are suitable for implementation as individual tables within a relational database structure that is used for the search engine database 309.

Indexing and hashing techniques can then be used, in conjunction with a local database 905 in an individual computer 705, in order to ensure highly efficient access to the large amounts of data that are being stored, updated and accessed by this system. In probabilistic data retrieval, each unique word, or term, is assigned a weight, w(t), in accordance with its rarity in the document set as a whole. A term is said to index a document when the document contains that term. Thus, all documents containing words that stem to "relativ" are considered as being indexed by the term "relativ". In an ideal probabilistic data retrieval system, documents will have been determined as being relevant to a term.

So, for example, a skilled librarian may have been employed to determine which documents are relevant to a term. This may or may not directly correspond with a term's indexing data. For example, the term "relativ" may be considered as being relevant to a document about Riemann Space, even though this document does not contain any words that stem to

"relativ". When relevance data of this kind is known, in addition to the indexing of terms to documents, an equation shown in Figure 17 may be used to determine an overall weight to each unique term that is used in the database 309. This equation is based upon a theoretical model of probabilistic information retrieval, and has been found to generate significance weightings for terms that result in optimal performance of a probabilistic information retrieval system. Values for w(t) will be required whenever a user supplies user-selected text as part of a search.

Although indexability of documents by terms can be determined relatively easily for documents found on the world wide web, relevance requires knowledge about document contents beyond that which is easily obtainable in an automatic information retrieval system of this type. When no documents are known as being relevant to a term t, the equation for w(t) shown in Figure 17 simplifies to the one shown in Figure 18. By examining the behaviour of this equation for different values of n and N, the weighting w(t) can be seen to increase with the rarity of documents indexed by term t. This is the mathematically precise formulation of the concept of significance weighting, that enables the dragging and dropping of text to be used as a useful method for defining a query for a search engine. A summary of equations used in probabilistic information retrieval is given in "Simple Proven Approaches to Text Retrieval", by S.E Robertson and K. Sparck Jones, Technical Report No. 356, University of Cambridge Computer

Laboratory, Cambridge CB2 3QG, England 1994.

The steps performed by the search application 904 running on the computer 704 in the search engine 123 are detailed in Figure 19. At step 1901 data in the form of query 301 is received from the user terminal 105 via the Internet 107 and the modem/router 701. At step 1904 a stemming algorithm is applied to the query string, in the manner described for step 1004 in Figure 10. This results in the generation of a set of query terms. Within query frequency (wqf) and within query position (wqp) data is stored in association with each term that is generated by the stemming algorithm from the user-selected text 306. Steps 1905 to 1907 may be implemented in a more efficient form than that which is about to be described. This will be apparent to those skilled in the art of database access. However, for the benefit of clarity of the desired effect, the present explanation is used.

At step 1905 the first document in the database 309 is selected. At step 1906 the weight W(D) for the document is evaluated by combining query term data and document data. These data may include wdf, wdp, wqf and wqp data previously described. At step 1907 a question is asked as to whether another document is available for consideration. If so, control is directed back to step 1905, and W(D) for the next document is calculated at step 1906. Alternatively, when all documents have been considered, control is directed to step 1908, where the documents are ranked in descending order of their W(D) values calculated at step 1906. At step 1909 a list comprising several of the top ranking documents is transmitted over the Internet back to the user at terminal 105. Thereafter, control is directed to step 1901 , where the search process awaits another user query.

An equation for calculating the weight W(D) of a document D is shown in Figure 20. This equation includes a value for w(t) for each term generated from the user-selected text 306. These values for w(t) are calculated in accordance with the equation shown in Figure 17 or Figure 18, using data gathered during the process of indexing documents on the web. For long queries of several hundred characters, some words may be repeated, and within query frequency (wqf) and normalised document length (ndl) of the query can be taken into account in order to improve the accuracy to which the probability of a document's relevance can be determined. An equation including wqf and wdl for the query, is shown in Figure 21. The result of actions performed by the search engine 123 at step

1909, in conjunction with actions performed by the user's computer 304 at step 611 , are illustrated in Figure 22. The user's monitor 106 includes a window generated by the web browser application 505. The list of documents 307 has been received by the user's computer 304 and is displayed in the generated window.

The procedures described herein provide a new type of advertising mechanism which may be described as being "active" compared to previously known passive advertising techniques. The nature of the active advertisement is that it provides the user with the results of a search from which particular items of interest may be selected. The marketing potential is such that the product or service being advertised is kept at the forefront of the user's mind for a longer period and evidence suggests that there is substantially stronger likelihood that a sale can subsequently be expected. Furthermore, users should appreciate that more useful information is being obtained for an advertisement of this type. Consequently, if active advertisements are identified as such when presented to a user, there is a greater likelihood that a hit will be made given that the user will gain a familiarity with advertisements of this type.

Claims

1. Apparatus for communicating information of an internet, comprising at least one user-computer; an inter-network for providing communication between a plurality of computer systems; at least one information service provider; and a remote server having a search engine capability, wherein a user selects a page of information from said information service provider; said service provider provides said selected page of information with an embedded invitation to seek new information of a particular information type; said user-computer includes detection means for detecting that a user has expressed an interest in said new information; said user-computer contacts said remote server to provide further information in the form of a search query; said remote server performs a searching operation to identify the location of at least one internet site of interest; and said remote server returns details of said at lest one identified location back to said user.

2. Apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein said communication is provided over the world wide web.

3. Apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein said invitations take the form of advertisements.

4. Apparatus according to claim 3, wherein said new information relates to a commercially available product or service.

5. Apparatus according to claim 1 , including a mouse having manually operable buttons and configured to position a cursor on a visual display device, wherein said user computer detection means detects that a user has expressed an interest in said new information by detecting the operation of a mouse button press when the cursor is placed in the vicinity of the displayed invitation.

6. Apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein said remote server performs said searching operation using a search engine and said search engine performs said search in response to pre-programmed search terms.

7. Apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein said search engine includes identifying means for identifying query terms from said search terms.

8. Apparatus according to claim 7, including calculating means for calculating the significance value for each of said identified query terms, such that said significance values are inversely related to a frequency of occurrence in a beatable data set.

9. Apparatus according to claim 8, wherein said calculating means is also configured to calculate a weighting value for each document referenced in a database by combining significance values of each query that indexes that document, such that weighting values are compared to rank said weighted documents; and documents of probable interest are identified in response to said ranking.

5 10. Apparatus according to claim 1 , wherein said searching operation selects pre-specified sets of locations.

11. A method of communicating information over an internet, wherein a page of information includes an invitation to a user to seek new o information of a particular type, comprising the steps of detecting that a user has expressed an interest in said new information; contacting a remote server for further information; performing a searching operation at said server to identify the location 5 of at least one Internet site of interest; and returning details of said identified locations back to said user.

12. A method of communicating according to claim 11 , wherein said communication is provided over the world wide web. 0

13. A method of communicating according to claim 11 , wherein said invitations take the form of advertisements.

14. A method of communicating according to claim 13, wherein 5 said new information relates to a commercially available product or service.

15. A method of communicating according to claim 11 , wherein said step of detecting that a user has expressed an interest is made in response to a mouse button being operated when a mouse pointer is located at the position of the invitation.

16. A method of communicating according to claim 11 , wherein said searching operation involves instructing a search engine in response to pre-programmed search terms.

17. A method of communicating according to claim 16, wherein query terms are identified from said search terms.

18. A method of communicating according to claim 17, wherein a significance value for each of said identified query terms is calculated, wherein said significance values are inversely related to a frequency of occurrence in a eatable data set.

19. A method according to claim 18, wherein a weighting value for each document references in a database is calculated by combining significance values of each query that indexes that document; weighting values are compared to rank said weighted documents; and documents of probable interest are identified in response to said ranking.

20. A method of communicating according to claim 11 , wherein said searching operation selects a pre-specified set of locations.

21. A graphical user interface displayable by a computer system and configured to incorporated within a web page, including a graphical invitation to a user to seek new information of a particular type; and embedded mark-up language commands defining a query relevant to said information type such that, when executed by said computer system, said user-computer includes detection means for detecting that a user has expressed an interest in said new information; said user-computer contacts said remote server to provide further information in the form of a search query; said remote server performs a searching operation to identify the location of at least one internet site of interest; and said remote server returns details of said identified locations back to said user-computer.

22. A graphical user interface according to claim 21 , wherein said invitation takes the form of an advertisement.

23. A graphical user interface according to claim 22, wherein said new information relates to a commercially available product or service.

24. A graphical user interface according to claim 21 , wherein a user's expression of interest is detected in response to the user operating a mouse.

25. Apparatus for serving new information to a user in response to a user's invitation, wherein said invitation has been added to first information selected by said user; said invitation includes at least one pre-specified search term; said serving apparatus includes a search engine; and said search engine identifies relevant web page locations in response to receiving said pre-specified search term.

26. Apparatus according to claim 25, wherein said search engine includes identifying means for identifying query terms from said search terms.

27. Apparatus according to claim 26, including calculating means for calculating the significance value for each of said identified query terms, such that said significance values are inversely related to a frequency of occurrence in a beatable data set.

28. Apparatus according to claim 27, wherein said calculating means is also configured to calculate a weighting value for each document referenced in a database by combining significance values of each query that indexes that document, such that weighting values are compared to rank said weighted documents; and documents of probable interest are identified in response to said ranking.

29. Apparatus substantially as herein described with reference to Figure 1 and Figures 3 to 22.

30. A method substantially as herein described with reference to

Figure 1 and Figures 3 to 22.