The invention comprises a set of complementary techniques that
dramatically improve enterprise search and navigation results. The core
of the invention is an expertise or knowledge index, called UseRank that
tracks the behavior of website visitors. The expertise-index is designed
to focus on the four key discoveries of enterprise attributes: Subject
Authority, Work Patterns, Content Freshness, and Group Know-how. The
invention produces useful, timely, cross-application, expertise-based
search and navigation results. In contrast, traditional Information
Retrieval technologies such as inverted index, NLP, or taxonomy tackle
the same problem with an opposite set of attributes than what the
enterprise needs: Content Population, Word Patterns, Content Existence,
and Statistical Trends. Overall, the invention emcompasses Baynote
Search--a enhancement over existing IR searches, Baynote Guide --a set of
community-driven navigations, and Baynote Insights--aggregated views of
visitor interests and trends and content gaps.