US Patent 6859784 Automated research tool

A method and apparatus for automatically gathering research data for a website. The method includes forming questions in a question set that are a measure of a research metric to be gathered for the website, partitioning the question set into a plurality of subsets of questions, identifying participants to query, and only presenting a subset of questions from the question set to each participant. Responses are gathered from each participant to the questions presented for the research metric and the participants' responses are combined to produce an index of the research metric.