US Patent 7680781 Automatic search query generation and results set management

Techniques are presented for automatic search query generation and results set management. A searcher makes selections from metadata; the metadata is associated with a particular lexicon or industry. Furthermore, the selections are mapped to fields associated with a data source. A thread-safe or unique search query is generated in response to the fields. The thread-safe search query is in a query language format which can query the data source. In an embodiment, the thread-safe search query is executed against the data source and the results returned are customized to rank the results, to sort the results, to filter the results, and/or to acquire a random sampling of the results.