Patent 8631006 was granted and assigned to Google on January, 2014 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Snippets of text provided are generated based in part on a user's profile. An item, such as a document, is examined to identify terms related to the user's profile. A term profile for an identified term is compared to a user's profile. The more closely related the identified term is to the user's profile, the higher a similarity score will be. Alternatively, terms found in a document may have a user profile score which may be obtained by looking the term up in the user's profile. Terms having high profile similarity scores or high user profile scores are used in identifying snippets which may be relevant to a user. The high scoring terms may be added to search terms and provided to a snippet generator.