US Patent 9047278 Identifying and ranking attributes of entities

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for query analysis. Queries are identified in query data, and an entity-descriptive portion and a suffix are determined in each query. Query counts are determined for a number of times that the respective queries occur in the query data. Based on the query counts, an entity-level count is estimated, which represents a number of query submissions that include the particular suffix and are considered to refer to a first entity. The entity is determined to be a particular type of entity. A type-level count is determined, which represents a number of query submissions that include the first suffix and are estimated to refer to entities of the particular type of entity. A score is assigned to the particular suffix based on the entity-level count and the type-level count.