Enhancing personal data search with information from social networks

摘要

The personal data search technique uses data input by users for a given user's personal data on a social networking site to enrich the given user's personal data. The technique annotates personal data stored on a personal computing device or in a computing cloud with data obtained from social networking sites (for example, tags, comments, likes/dislikes and so forth) provided by friends/other users in the given user's social network or networks. Such annotations can later are used by search engine to enhance the search functionality and/or to improve the ranking of search results. Since the data is entered by actual human users it is very accurate and since the data is already readily available on social networks the cost to obtain it is very inexpensive.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented process for annotating personal data, comprising:
obtaining from a social network application information explicitly provided by users of the social network application on a given user's personal data located on the social network created by the social network application; matching the given user's personal data stored on the given user's personal computing device to the given user's personal data located on the social network and extracting the information provided by users of the social network application; attaching the extracted information provided by users of the social network application to the matched user's personal data stored on the user's personal computing device so that the extracted information provided by the other users of the social network application can be used to locate the user's personal data stored on the user's personal computing device.