Order Granting Motion For Preliminary Injunction - United States ...

United States District Court
For the Northern District of California
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interface allowing a user to search simultaneously across different types of information storage
systems. See id. Thus, a user had to access a different interface to search for different types of
information depending on that information’s stored location.
Second, the prior art lacked sufficient search criteria to effectively filter information
available, often yielding long and cumbersome keyword-based search results. Id. at 1:40-45; id. at
1:60-2:4. The inventors of the ’604 Patent identified a need for technology that “allows the
computer to help the user determine such additional criteria or to automatically provide additional
criteria, so that search results have a higher percentage of items that are of interest to the user.” Id.
at 2:1-4. Prior to the ’604 Patent, “there [had been] no program which [was] able to process the
user’s input and then determine, using many different factors, including use of the Internet, the
intent of the user as to the file to be retrieved.” Id. at 2:14-17. To that end, the ’604 Patent is
directed to a universal computer interface that employs a plurality of “heuristic algorithms” to help
filter the user’s searches across multiple information storage systems and to display only the most
relevant search results, thereby making a user’s search more efficient and personalized.
In one preferred embodiment, the ’604 system relies on a “retrieval manager” component
that receives search terms from the user, either in the form of text or speech, and dispatches that
input to a plurality of “plug-in modules.” See id. at 4:1-12 & Fig. 2. Each of these modules has an
associated heuristic search algorithm, which the module employs to locate information within the
module’s respective area of search that is responsive to the user’s input. See id. at 4:24-25. For
instance, one module may be configured to search the titles of local documents that pertain to the
search terms. Another module may be configured to index and search the contents of locally stored
files for relevant matches. A third module may search a list of the most recently accessed files,
applications, and web sites. A fourth module may employ a search engine to locate Internet web
pages whose content matches the user’s search terms. See id. at 4:15-23. The results from the
modules are returned to the retrieval manager, which in turn presents the results to the user,
potentially after employing an additional heuristic to determine which results are most relevant.
See id. at 4:26-30. The ’604 system enables searching to occur on portions of the user’s input as
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Case No.: 12-cv-00630-LHK
ORDER GRANTING MOTION FOR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION