Abstract: Aspects of the subject matter described herein relate to matching product information to products. In aspects, a product matching component receives product information. The product matching component normalizes the product information and obtains keywords from the product information. By querying a database of recognized products, the keywords are used to obtain a list of products that potentially match the product information. A confidence level is assigned to each of the potential matches in the list. A match may be returned for the highest matched product or for a selectable number of products whose confidence level(s) exceed a selectable threshold.

Abstract: A method and system for ranking pages of a search result based on the mobile readiness of the pages is provided. A mobile-readiness system receives an indication of pages that are to be ranked. The mobile-readiness system evaluates the mobile readiness for each of the pages. Mobile readiness indicates suitability of the page for a mobile device. The mobile readiness system then ranks the pages based on the generated mobile readiness and some other criterion such as a relevance score or an importance score. The mobile-readiness system may train a classifier to classify pages based on their mobile readiness.

Abstract: Described is a data-centric web search engine technology/architecture, in which document metadata, including offline-extracted metadata, is used as part of a search indexing and ranking pipeline. A web data management component receives crawled documents and extracts document metadata from the documents. An indexing component uses the document metadata to build an index for the documents. A serving component uses the index and the document metadata to serve content, e.g., search results. Also described is the use of query metadata extracted from queries of a query log for use in the pipeline.

Abstract: A method and system for determining relevance of a document having text and images to a text string is provided. A scoring system identifies image text associated with an image of the document. The scoring system calculates an image score indicating relevance of the image text to the text string. The image score may be used in many applications, such as searching, summary generation, and document classification, image search, and image classification.

Abstract: Described is a summarizing a web entity (e.g., a person, place, product or so forth) based upon the entity's appearance in web documents (e.g., on the order of hundreds of millions or billions of webpages). Webpages are separated into blocks, which are then processed according to various features to filter the number of blocks to further process, and rank the most relevant blocks with respect to the entity that remain. A redundancy removal mechanism removes redundant blocks, leaving a set of remaining blocks that are used to provide a summary of information that is relevant to the entity.

Abstract: Described is the running of search-related experiments on a full (or partial) offline snapshot copy of the search engine documents of an actual production system. A snapshot experimentation subsystem runs experimental code related to web searches on the offline data, including to run experimental index building code to build an experimental index (e.g., to test a new document feature), and/or to run experimental search-related code, such as to rank search results according to experimental ranking code, to implement an experimental search strategy, and/or to generate experimental captions.

Abstract: Described is a flexible framework for index building and document retrieval in a search environment that allows different search scenario applications to reuse index building and document retrieval code for non-scenario-specific functionality. Interfaces to various functionality of an index builder and retrieval engine are defined. An application calls the interfaces to specify custom code to perform a search scenario when needed, or use default code when non-scenario-specific functionality may be used.

Abstract: Described is a technology for understanding entities of a webpage, e.g., to label the entities on the webpage. An iterative and bidirectional framework processes a webpage, including a text understanding component (e.g., extended Semi-CRF model) that provides text segmentation features to a structure understanding component (e.g., extended HCRF model). The structure understanding component uses the text segmentation features and visual layout features of the webpage to identify a structure (e.g., labeled block). The text understanding component in turn uses the labeled block to further understand the text. The process continues iteratively until a similarity criterion is met, at which time the entities may be labeled. Also described is the use of multiple mentions of a set of text in the webpage to help in labeling an entity.

Abstract: In community mining based on core objects and affiliated objects, a set of core objects for a community of objects are identified from a plurality of objects. The community is expanded, based on the set of core objects, to include a set of affiliated objects. According to one aspect, a model of a community of objects is obtained by grouping a first collection of a plurality of objects into a center portion, and grouping a second collection of the plurality of objects into one or more concentric portions around the center portion. The groupings of the first and second collections of the objects are identified as the community of objects.

Abstract: A method and system for determining relevance of a document having text and images to a text string is provided. A scoring system identifies image text associated with an image of the document. The scoring system calculates an image score indicating relevance of the image text to the text string. The image score may be used in many applications, such as searching, summary generation, and document classification, image search, and image classification.

Abstract: Features extracted from network browser pages and/or network search queries are leveraged to facilitate in detecting a user's browsing and/or searching intent. Machine learning classifiers constructed from these features automatically detect a user's online commercial intention (OCI). A user's intention can be commercial or non-commercial, with commercial intentions being informational or transactional. In one instance, an OCI ranking mechanism is employed with a search engine to facilitate in providing search results that are ranked according to a user's intention. This also provides a means to match purchasing advertisements with potential customers who are more than likely ready to make a purchase (transactional stage). Additionally, informational advertisements can be matched to users who are researching a potential purchase (informational stage).

Abstract: A method and system for labeling object information of an information page is provided. A labeling system identifies an object record of an information page based on the labeling of object elements within an object record and labels object elements based on the identification of an object record that contains the object elements. To identify the records and label the elements, the labeling system generates a hierarchical representation of blocks of an information page. The labeling system identifies records and elements within the records by propagating probability-related information of record labels and element labels through the hierarchy of the blocks. The labeling system generates a feature vector for each block to represent the block and calculates a probability of a label for a block being correct based on a score derived from the feature vectors associated with related blocks. The labeling system searches for the labeling of records and elements that has the highest probability of being correct.

Abstract: A mechanism is provided for enabling an auxiliary program to be executed in a computer system, after an operating system has been loaded and executed, without rebooting the computer system. This may be achieved by suspending execution of the operating system, executing the auxiliary program while execution of the operating system is suspended, and then resuming execution of the operating system. In suspending execution of the operating system, state information defining a current state of the computer system is saved. In resuming execution of the operating system, the saved state information is used to restore the computer system to the current state. No state information or data should be lost as a result of suspending and resuming execution of the operating system. From the viewpoint of the operating system and the applications (if any) executing within the environment provided by the operating system, execution of the auxiliary program is transparent.

Abstract: A search method uses pseudo-anchor text associated with search objects to improve search performance. The pseudo-anchor text may be extracted in combination with an identifier of the search objects (such as a pseudo-URL) from a digital corpus such as a collection of documents. Pseudo-anchor texts for each object are preferably extracted from candidate anchor blocks using a machine learning based approach. The pseudo-anchor texts are made available for searching and used to help rank the objects in a search result to improve search performance. The method may be used in vertical search of objects such as published articles, products and images that lack explicit URLs and anchor text information.

Abstract: A mechanism is provided for enabling an auxiliary program to be executed in a computer system, after an operating system has been loaded and executed, without rebooting the computer system. This may be achieved by suspending execution of the operating system, executing the auxiliary program while execution of the operating system is suspended, and then resuming execution of the operating system. In suspending execution of the operating system, state information defining a current state of the computer system is saved. In resuming execution of the operating system, the saved state information is used to restore the computer system to the current state. No state information or data should be lost as a result of suspending and resuming execution of the operating system. From the viewpoint of the operating system and the applications (if any) executing within the environment provided by the operating system, execution of the auxiliary program is transparent.

Abstract: A method and system for labeling object information of an information page is provided. A labeling system identifies an object record of an information page based on the labeling of object elements within an object record and labels object elements based on the identification of an object record that contains the object elements. To identify the records and label the elements, the labeling system generates a hierarchical representation of blocks of an information page. The labeling system identifies records and elements within the records by propagating probability-related information of record labels and element labels through the hierarchy of the blocks. The labeling system generates a feature vector for each block to represent the block and calculates a probability of a label for a block being correct based on a score derived from the feature vectors associated with related blocks. The labeling system searches for the labeling of records and elements that has the highest probability of being correct.

Abstract: A content object indexing process including creating a content object knowledge index, calculating a description vector of a target content object, and indexing the target content object by searching for the description vector in the content object knowledge database. It may be difficult to search for an exact content object such as a music file or academic researcher as a conventional search index may not include related hierarchical information. A content object indexing process may add hierarchical information taken from a content object knowledge index and incorporate the hierarchical information to the index entry for a specific content object. An application of such a content object indexing process may be a world wide web search engine.

Abstract: In one aspect, this disclosure relates to a method and associated apparatus that allows a user to obtain a semi-structured data input and a workload input. An improved semi-structured data storage schema is selected for a relational schema in response to the semi-structured data input and the workload input. The semi-structured data is segmented based on the selected improved semi-structured data storage schema. In one aspect, the semi-structured data is XML data.

Abstract: A method and system for generating wrappers for hierarchically organized documents by jointly optimizing template detection and wrapper generation is provided. A wrapper generation system generates a wrapper for documents with similar templates by identifying a cluster of document trees and generating a wrapper tree for the cluster. A wrapper tree defines the wrapper for documents that match the template of the cluster. The wrapper generation system clusters document trees by generating a wrapper tree for the cluster based on an initial document tree. The wrapper generation system then repeatedly determines whether any other document tree matches or nearly matches the wrapper tree for the cluster and, if so, adds the document tree to the cluster and adjusts the wrapper tree as appropriate so that all the document trees, including the newly added one, match the wrapper tree.

Abstract: A search method uses pseudo-anchor text associated with search objects to improve search performance. The pseudo-anchor text may be extracted in combination with an identifier of the search objects (such as a pseudo-URL) from a digital corpus such as a collection of documents. Pseudo-anchor texts for each object are preferably extracted from candidate anchor blocks using a machine learning based approach. The pseudo-anchor texts are made available for searching and used to help ranking the objects in a search result to improve search performance. Method may be used in vertical search of objects such as published articles, products and images that lack explicit URL and anchor text information.