1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to providing customized content to a user and, more particularly, providing Web content to a user based on profiled user information and profiled Web content.
2. Background Description
A problem of content overload has become a burden to users of information in many situations. One current situation in which people face content overload is the World Wide Web, but the problem exists in other areas as well, such as, for example, books, magazines, libraries, and entertainment, both video and audio.
Current attempts to solve this problem originate with the content providers. Content providers find it expedient to organize and offer their content in collections suited to their needs and the array of content they offer, with limited attention to users' needs. Content providers therefore offer multiple independent sources (often web sites). This approach puts the burden on an individual to learn and understand all the sites/sources that may exist concerning a topic or concept. The individual typically must wade through vast collections of content to discover that which is of interest and then the individual typically is burdened with all that is necessary to maintain links or pointers to the collections of content of interest. Unfortunately, maintaining the links or pointers quickly becomes obsolete as the collections change, so the user is forced to relearn, update, and understand the sources again and again. Additionally, users often must also correlate information across the many sources/sites that are discovered with related information relevant to the user's needs.
On the World Wide Web, current solutions typically involve content providers creating their own web sites, sometimes more than one for different audiences even when those audiences and interests overlap. The sites typically have content the users want or need and users generally want content from the many sites. However, the sites have structures which may or may not be consistent, but users must nevertheless understand all the different structures. Users typically would prefer to take slices of content from across those sites, but they cannot do so and users cannot easily maintain links and pointers into those sites because the sites change continuously. Therefore, convenient access to the disassociated information is greatly inhibited and hinders ready identification and/or retrieval of the information, particularly since the content is rarely organized to provide uniform search and access to the disparate information based on users' profiles.