Viewer Targeting using Negative Preferences

As the old saying goes: "1 mistake erases 10 at-a-boys".

So goes the effect of a bad preference rating. US Patent No 9,122,760 performs analysis by weighting negative preferences against positives to enable more accurate viewer targeting.  This patent includes claims for analyzing weighted preferences including mixes of positive and negative preferences.

Enhanced Preference Mining -> Expand your base of online reviews by up to 100x

Viewers shopping online are frequently offered additional items that relate to items they are viewing.  Common forms of this include:

                                 "People who like this also liked..."
 

For existing systems, reviews for products offered in this way are harvested only from the website making the offer.  At the same time there are much greater numbers of reviews for the same product and other products on other websites. To correlate these reviews requires the missing link covered by the claims in US Pat No 8,429,160.

Reviews can be correlated across many websites if you could tell that the same person wrote reviews on multiple sites. This invention does two things:

(1) It harvests reviews from multiple sites based on the initial assumption that a person typically uses the same username on multiple websites.

(2) Then to ensure accuracy, the invention determines when multiple people are using the same username, and properly handles this exception.

There are many Internet based marketing companies that don't stock and ship products themselves.  Instead they perform referral selling by rating and suggesting products available on a multitude of websites.  In order to maximize the effectiveness of a customer engagement, it is beneficial to these companies to offer suggestions for other products than just one that a customer has initial interest in. By harvesting reviews from many websites, the owner of this patent is able to offer suggestions that have a much richer base of reviews to build on, and do so much earlier when products are new to the market.

Any company that sells (either directly or indirectly) products on the Web from multiple manufacturers, and provides rating and/or preference information, should be interested in this IP.  It will enable them to provide a broader and more comprehensive range of preference-driven suggestions to their customers.  For a company that may already be using the IP, purchasing this portfolio will not only protect their position in the market, but also provide a platform for assertively enforcing their rights.

Note that besides reviews for products, this patent applies to any kind of review, including media (music, TV shows, movies, videos) as well as services such as restaurants and hotels.