Patent 7634462 was granted and assigned to Yahoo! on December, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A system and method for receiving a query and determining candidate alternate queries. A query may be parsed into concepts and then candidates for alternate terms may be determined for either the whole query or the determined concepts. Candidates are scored for their respective similarity to the original query. After scoring, at least one candidate is chosen and may be used as a possible alternate query choice for a user or used to serve bidded advertisements to the user.