Systems and Methods for Gathering, Merging, and Returning Data Describing Entities Based Upon Identifying Information

摘要

Customer Insight (CI) systems in accordance with various embodiments of the invention gather information sets from multiple remote information sources and can merge the information sets to identify authoritative information describing the named entity. In several embodiments, the information sets and/or the authoritative information are identified using geographic location information associated with the information sets. In many embodiments, the CI systems identify relationship information within the merged information sets and use the relationship information to identify customers of businesses. Once identified, merged and/or authoritative information sets describing customers can be used to build customer lists, typical customer profiles, and best customer profiles. In addition, the CI system can utilize information describing customers to automatically generate advertising targeting data and online advertising campaigns.

主权项

1. A method of generating authoritative information sets for named entities using a customer insight system, the method comprising:
gathering sets of characteristic data from a plurality of remote electronic information sources using a customer insight system, wherein the characteristic data comprises data selected from a group consisting of unique identifiers, geographic location data, and text data; storing the gathered sets of characteristic data in a crawler database using the keyword targeting data generation system; receiving a query including at least one initial piece of identifying information for a given named entity using the customer insight system; building an identifying information set based on the at least one initial piece of identifying information using the customer insight system by gathering additional identifying information that describes characteristics of the given named entity by repeatedly:
querying a plurality of remote electronic information sources using the customer insight system;receiving at least one information set from the plurality of remote electronic information sources using the customer insight system, wherein the at least one received information set comprises characteristic data describing at least the given named entity and the characteristic data comprises data selected from a group consisting of unique identifiers, geographic location data, and text data; andmerging at least a subset of the received at least one information set with the identifying information set for the given named entity to create merged information sets for the given named entity that are stored in a feeds database using the customer insight system, wherein merging the at least the subset of the received at least one information set with the identifying information set for the given named entity to create merged information sets further comprises:
merging sets of characteristic data in the feeds database that contain matching unique identifiers;merging sets of characteristic data in the feeds database that do not contain matching unique identifiers based on a comparison of geographical location data, wherein the comparison of geographic location data comprises:
determining a distance between geographic locations contained in geographic location data included in a first set of characteristic data set and a second set of characteristic data in the feeds database; andmerging the first set of characteristic data with the second set of characteristic data to create a merged information set when the determined distance is within a threshold distance; selecting characteristic data from the merged information sets for the given named entity to be used in an authoritative information set for the given named entity using the customer insight system, wherein the customer insight system selects at least one piece of characteristic data from conflicting characteristic data in the merged information sets as part of an authoritative information set for the given named entity based upon at least one factor including a comparison of geographic location data associated with each of a plurality of different merged information sets that include pieces of characteristic data that provide conflicting descriptions of a specific characteristic of the given named entity; storing the authoritative information set in a production database using the customer insight system, wherein the production database stores authoritative information sets for a plurality of named entities; and returning at least one piece of information from the authoritative information set for the given named entity in response to the query using the customer insight system.