Abstract: Advertising slots on a search engine results page may be determined based on keywords and/or results to a user query. Advertisers may use the keywords and/or the results to the query to place their ads into the advertising slots. Rules may be applied to determine how ads are displayed or not displayed. For example, a larger set of keywords may be inferred from the initial set of keywords on which the ad provider placed her bids. This greatly increases the potential reach of an advertiser's ad campaign or a search engine provider's revenue from ad placement.

Abstract: A system, method, computer program and system for suspending a result set and continuing from a suspended result set for transparent session migration is disclosed. The rows from a row source are suspended into storage, so that after session migration, the client fetches can transparently continue from the suspended result set.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for efficiently processing data requests in a network oriented n-tier database environment is presented. According to one embodiment of the invention, certain or all data from the tables of a database server device can be maintained in tables on the client device in a client side database cache server system. This local cache allows the network oriented n-tier database system to eliminate the expense of repetitive network transmissions to respond to duplicate queries for the same information. Additionally, the local client device may also keep track of what data is cached on peer network nodes. This allows the client to request that data from a peer database cache server and off load that burden from the database server device. Moreover, the local client may also keep statistics regarding the frequency of requested data in order to optimize the data set maintained in the local database cache server.

Abstract: Techniques allow a client to be switched from a session on a server to another session on another server in a way that is a transparent to the application for which the initial session was established. Thus, under transparent session migration, a client is switched between sessions without executing application instructions tailored to accomplish the migration. Instead, a client-side interface component, through which the application interacts with the server, handles details of migration, modifying the internal state of the client-side interface component to effect the same. Legacy applications do not have to be modified in order to institute techniques described herein.

Abstract: Relevant search results for a given query may be determined using click data for the query and the number of times the query is issued to a search engine. The number of clicks that a result receives for the given query may provide a feedback mechanism to the search engine on how relevant the result is for the given query. The frequency of a query along with the associated clicks provides the search engine with the effectiveness of the query in producing relevant results. Edges in a graph of queries versus results may be weighted in accordance with the click data and the efficiency to rank the search results provided to a user.

Abstract: Large numbers of lists of entities may be mined for similar entities to related searches. A representation for each list may be determined to provide for a comparison between lists and to support membership checks. A score for an element in a list may be computed that represents the validity of an item in the corpus of lists. Thus, a spurious element would receive a very low score, where a valid element would receive a higher score. A list weight is then computed using the constituent element weights, and the element and list weight are used to compute the nearest neighbors of a given query element.

Abstract: A computer-implemented method of streaming a plurality of messages from a source queue to at least one destination queue over a computer network. The method may include steps of generating a remote procedure call, the remote procedure being configured to encapsulate at least header data, message data for each of the plurality of messages and an end of batch token, the header data being common to each of the plurality of messages and including an identification of the at least one destination queue, the end of batch token signaling that no further message data follows; sending the generated remote procedure call over the computer network to the destination queue identified in the header data, and dequeueing at least the message data for each of the plurality of messages from the source queue and streaming the dequeued messages over the network, and successively enqueueing each streamed message data into the at least one destination queue identified by the header data until the end of batch token is received.

Abstract: A method is disclosed for identifying queries stored in a log which are semantically related to an input query that may include a large number of terms. A set of one or more subsequences are generated for each query stored in the log, and these sets of subsequences are stored in a lookup table. A set of one or more subsequences are also generated for the input query. The subsequences in the lookup table and of the input query are generated by hashing of the respective query terms to a value between 0 and 1 using a known technique of min-hashing. The present system then constructs the subsequences of the query using the k-min hashes of the query, where k is an integer based on the number of terms in the query.

Abstract: A method, computer-readable medium, and system for providing a quality measurement based on communications within a communication application. Communication attributes that include information associated with a user's communications are obtained. In embodiments, such communication attributes may pertain to communication duration and communication frequency. Upon obtaining communication attributes, a quality measurement may be determined based on the communication attributes. Such a quality measurement provides an indication of the quality of the user's communications. In embodiments, the quality measurement may be stored, communicated to a user, or implemented within a communication application.

Abstract: When a request for a shutdown of a server (e.g. database server) is requested, existing sessions established for the clients are migrated to another server. Some sessions may not be migrated for various reasons; these sessions may be terminated without migrating them.

Abstract: A method and mechanism for dynamically changing the logical path of a state machine to avoid conflicts or problems is provided. A toggle state is employed for a state machine that allows dynamic changes in the computation path of a state machine. By analyzing the expected response state of a remote state machine, toggle states can be inserted in the path of a local state machine to avoid conflicts. This approach can be advantageously employed to reduce or prevent half-duplex violations for communications between applications on multiple computing nodes.

Abstract: A first embodiment of the invention provides a system that automatically classifies documents in a collection into clusters based on the similarities between documents, that automatically classifies new documents into the right clusters, and that may change the number or parameters of clusters under various circumstances. A second embodiment of the invention provides a technique for comparing two documents, in which a fingerprint or sketch of each document is computed. In particular, this embodiment of the invention uses a specific algorithm to compute the document's fingerprint. One embodiment uses a sentence in the document as a logical delimiter or window from which significant words are extracted and, thereafter, a hash is computed of all pair-wise permutations. Words are extracted based on their weight in the document, which can be computed using measures such as term frequency and the inverse document frequency.

Abstract: A system, a method and computer-readable media for identifying and presenting potential query refinements for a user's search input. Documents are identified as being responsive to the search input. A query log is accessed to identify previously entered queries that also returned one or more of the identified documents. From these previously entered queries, a portion of the queries are selected as potential query refinements. Thereafter, the potential query refinements are displayed to the user.

Abstract: A first embodiment of the invention provides a system that automatically classifies documents in a collection into clusters based on the similarities between documents, that automatically classifies new documents into the right clusters, and that may change the number or parameters of clusters under various circumstances. A second embodiment of the invention provides a technique for comparing two documents, in which a fingerprint or sketch of each document is computed. In particular, this embodiment of the invention uses a specific algorithm to compute the document's fingerprint, One embodiment uses a sentence in the document as a logical delimiter or window from which significant words are extracted and, thereafter, a hash is computed of all pair-wise permutations. Words are extracted based on their weight in the document, which can be computed using measures such as term frequency and the inverse document frequency.

Abstract: Techniques allow a client to be switched from a session on a server to another session on another server in a way that is a transparent to the application for which the initial session was established. Thus, under transparent session migration, a client is switched between sessions without executing application instructions tailored to accomplish the migration. Instead, a client-side interface component, through which the application interacts with the server, handles details of migration, modifying the internal state of the client-side interface component to effect the same. Legacy applications do not have to be modified in order to institute techniques described herein.

Abstract: A method and mechanism for reducing the expense of data transmissions and storage between a first node and a second for a remote-mapped query or a query involving a distributed join operation is disclosed. Data prefetching can be utilized to predictably retrieve information. Data redundancy management can be employed to reduce the expense of transmitting and storing redundant data.

Abstract: A system and method is disclosed that allows resources to be shared among multiple entities, but which can appropriately release system resources after the failure or shutdown of the calling entity. In one approach, a monitoring entity is available to check for session failures. If a session failure is detected, the session is identified in a shared list that is accessible to other related entities. The related entities can be configured to piggyback a message to an appropriate node to kill, shutdown, or release resources associated with the failed session. Alternatively, a related entity can be specifically initiated to send a message to the appropriate node to kill, shutdown, or release the resources.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for efficiently transmitting a result set. A data server receives a data request from a client or another server. The data server determines whether a threshold portion of the contents of each requested row or record is being retrieved (e.g., X% of the number of columns in a table or X% of the total amount of data in a table row). The requested rows are retrieved in the same format in which they are stored (e.g., within a disk block), and streamed to the client, one row at a time. The client is then responsible for disassembling a row into its columns, reordering them if necessary, and performing any necessary post-processing (e.g., datatype conversion, data formatting) before consuming the data.

Abstract: A method and system for implementing an improved access interface infrastructure is disclosed. In one approach, an access interface methods is directly supported by an application. The directly supported access interface method corresponds to an access interface implementation. Other access interface methods are transparently processed by being converted or mapped into a generic interface format, which is then translated into the directly supported format.

Abstract: A first embodiment of the invention provides a system that automatically classifies documents in a collection into clusters based on the similarities between documents, that automatically classifies new documents into the right clusters, and that may change the number or parameters of clusters under various circumstances. A second embodiment of the invention provides a technique for comparing two documents, in which a fingerprint or sketch of each document is computed. In particular, this embodiment of the invention uses a specific algorithm to compute the document's fingerprint, One embodiment uses a sentence in the document as a logical delimiter or window from which significant words are extracted and, thereafter, a hash is computed of all pair-wise permutations. Words are extracted based on their weight in the document, which can be computed using measures such as term frequency and the inverse document frequency.