USING ACTIVATION PATHS TO CLUSTER PROXIMITY QUERY RESULTS

A search engine finds and ranks information in clusters so a user can select information listed in search results that are closer to his information needs. To do so, the search engine receives a proximity query and executes it against an entity-relationship graph. The search engine finds those entities in the graph that have similar relationships between nodes. For example, two entities in a graph may be connected to entirely different nodes, but they may connect to those different nodes using similarly labeled paths. The search engine identifies the relationship between the nodes, clusters entities that are connected by similar relationships, and presents the clustered information to the user as part of the search results. In this way, the search engine provides a user with a results from which the user can select the group of results that most closely match his information need.