RightNow granted new patent.

RightNow Technologies recently announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company U.S. Patent No. 6,665,655 titled "Implicit Rating of Retrieved Information in an Information Search System." The patent, which marks the third U.S. patent awarded for RightNow's knowledge base technology, protects its user-driven technique for implicitly ranking knowledge base content items based on their relative helpfulness. RightNow also announced that it has filed a U.S. patent application for its approach to creating campaign test cells in RightNow Outbound, a permission-based e-mail marketing solution introduced in September 2003. Invented by RightNow employees Mike Myer, VP of Development, and Doug Warner, head of Applied Research, the newly patented technique helps improve the speed and efficacy of knowledge base searches by ensuring that the answers proven to be most helpful to users automatically rise to the top of retrieved results. RightNow believes its answer ranking technique is unique in the industry because it uses both explicit and implicit methods, which is determined by each user's behavior.

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