Patent 6993586 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on January, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The disclosed subject matter models or predicts a user's intention during network or WWW navigation. Specifically, a statistical multi-step n-gram probability model is used to predict a user's optimal information goal. The optimal information goal is based on a sequence of previously visited network content pieces and a globally optimized navigation path through the sequence.