As the amount of data stored on networks, both local and global, increases, the ease of accessing relevant data becomes a non-trivial question. Evidence of this trend is illustrated in the rise of Internet search engines as a major sector of the Internet economy. A plethora of solutions have been developed to attempt to index the amount of data on large networks such as the Internet. These solutions allow users to search for data across the Internet from a single point of access and, through sophisticated indexing mechanisms, attempt to return or otherwise identify the most relevant data possible for a given user query.
Although indexing increases the chances of aiding a user in locating relevant results from a large number of content items, it does not fully exploit or incorporate the browsing behavior of a user. That is, the general functionality of a search engine is not concerned with what a user has previously looked at, only what they are currently looking at. One method of solving this problem is the use of bookmarks, implemented by many popular web browsing software and several web-based bookmark applications. Bookmarks allow a user to store a reference to a content item of interest on their device or the web with the purpose of easily returning to the desired content item. The use of a bookmark is a simplistic solution that contains many inherent problems. First, bookmarks are maintained by the individual, thus their organization (or lack thereof) is dictated by the individual, usually resulting in an unorganized set of bookmarks. Second, bookmarks require active participation from the user. That is, a user must manually select to bookmark a web page in order to retain its location. Third, bookmarks are local objects and are thus unavailable to a user operating on a device other than the device containing his or her bookmarks.
Another prior art solution is to maintain a chronology of a user's searching behavior. In this approach, a search engine maintains a chronological listing of content items for which a user has searches and the results that user selects in response to a given search query. This approach provides a history of user interaction, but severely limits the usability of the stored data. A user must know approximately when a search term was entered and is usually only given titles of visited content items, thus requiring the user to remember the contents of the content item.
Thus there is a need in the art for systems, methods and computer program products for providing users with intelligent history data on the basis of search engine interaction. Embodiments of the present invention display the results of a user history session on a search page and allows for the clustering of history data, e.g., by time or by search query keyword analysis, thereby allowing a user to more efficiently evaluate and locate past history results.