Online searching and advertising may be an important source of revenue for enterprises engaged in electronic commerce. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a web page to be configured to display search results and/or advertisements. Online searching is a common way for consumers to locate information, goods, or services on the Internet. Consumers use the Internet and search engines to find information and make decisions among online entities such as websites, online companies, or online services, independent of geographic constraints.
A consumer may use an online search engine to type in one or more queries or keywords to search for other pages or web sites with information related to the query. Search results and/or advertisements are displayed after the query. Consumers may reformulate the query based on observing the search results to the initial query. This reformulation process may result in a series of queries that are related to a single need or consumer intent. The search results may be chosen and displayed based on the presumed intent of the consumer performing the search. Identification of a consumer's intent may result in improved targeting of advertisements to the consumer, as well as improved relevance of the search results that are displayed. The intent of a consumer in searching may be spread over multiple queries, such that the consumer performs several searches for a single or related purpose. It may be beneficial to identify a consumer's intent over multiple search queries.