A BannerBean is a small control added by website publishers to the advertisements in their sites See Fig. 1. The BannerBean operates in conjunction with our BannerBean service to collect and store the advertisements viewed by visitors to those sites.

During normal Internet browsing, the advertisements served to each visitor are collected into an individual history of advertisements in our BannerBean database. The collection process is entirely automatic and requires no attention from site visitors See Fig. 2.

By clicking any BannerBean control in any BannerBean enabled website, site visitors may quickly display ads they've viewed in other BannerBean enabled sites. Such previously viewed ads appear at the page location of the ad associated with the clicked BannerBean See Fig. 3.

Simply put, each BannerBean and its associated ad operate like a tiny web browser embedded within a web page and limited to advertising content.

Website publishers typically receive advertisements as blocks of HTML they drop into their web pages. To add BannerBean functionality to a page, a publisher simply inserts each ad's HTML block into a BannerBean "wrapper" before dropping it into the web page. The wrapper allows BannerBean software to access the ad within the page. The publisher also adds a few HTML lines at the beginning of the page that reference BannerBean's software code and CSS file.

When a BannerBean enabled page is served to a site visitor, the BannerBean software waits for content loading to finish, then locates all ads within the page and transmits their HTML blocks to BannerBean's server. The server reads a browser cookie to uniquely identify the visitor, then stores the ads based on that identification.

After the ads are stored, the server sends a history list to the BannerBean software in the visitor's browser. That list enables BannerBean's user control and software to retrieve any ad stored for the visitor in the BannerBean database. After the list is received, BannerBean controls are made visible on all ads within the page See Fig. 4.

Whenever a site visitor clicks on a navigational button in the BannerBean control, the BannerBean server is queried for the HTML block of a specific ad. The HTML is retrieved, then used to display its advertisement at the BannerBean location in the web page.

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