Abstract: Website design pattern modeling technique embodiments are presented that model a website's design patterns. This can be based on the website's layout elements, its URL tokens, or both. When based on both, the design patterns can be modeled separately using first the layout elements and then the URL tokens, or vice versa. Alternately, the modeling can be based on coupled layout and URL token patterns. In operation, the modeling involves first identifying layout elements and/or URL tokens found on at least some of the pages of the website. The website design patterns are then modeled based on the occurrences of the identified layout elements and/or URL tokens in pages of the website. In cases where a coupled modeling scheme is employed, a modeling technique that exploits the correlations between the layout elements and URL tokens is used.

Abstract: The described systems, methods and data structures are directed to ranking Web pages with hierarchical considerations. The hierarchical structures and the linking relationships of the World Wide Web are used to provide a page importance ranking for Web searches. The linking relationships are aggregated to a high level node at each of the hierarchical structures. A link graph analysis is performed on the aggregated linking relationships to determine the importance of each node. The importance of each node may be propagated to pages associated with that node. For each page, the importance of that page and the importance of the node associated with the page are used to calculate the page importance ranking.

Abstract: The incremental web forum crawling technique described herein is a web forum crawling technique that employs a thread-wise strategy that takes into account thread-level statistics, for example, the number of replies and the frequency of replies, to estimate the activity trend of each thread. To extract such statistical information, the technique employs a simple yet very robust approach to extract the timestamp of each post in a discussion thread. It also employs a regression model to predict the time of the next post for each thread.

Abstract: A blog-based city landmark discovery framework is described to discover and summarize popular scenes and their representative views from blog photos to provide online personalized tourist suggestions. First, a location extraction algorithm is implemented to infer geographical associations of blog photos from their contextual descriptors, thus providing the ability to harvest city scene photos from web blogs. Second, a visual-textual hierarchical clustering scheme is adopted to organize crawled photos into a scene-view structure, and present a PhotoRank algorithm to discover representative views within each scene by viewing the representative photo selection problem as a popularity ranking problem in a visual correlation environment. Third, author, context and content issues are evaluated in a unified Landmark-HITS model to discover representative scenes as well as build author correlations.

Abstract: A system for calculating the importance of web pages is provided. The web pages are organized hierarchically into collections. The system calculates the importance of each collection based on inter-collection links from a web page in one collection to a web page in another collection. The system then calculates the importance of web pages in the collections with a high calculated importance based on links between the web pages in those collections using, for example, a conventional page rank algorithm. The system may also calculate the importance of web pages in each collection with a low calculated importance separately based on the links between the web pages in the collection using, for example, a conventional page rank algorithm.

Abstract: In some implementations, a plurality of first questions and corresponding first answers are identified at a community question-answer (CQA) site as a plurality of first question-answer (q-a) pairs. A query thread comprised of a second question and a plurality of candidate second answers is selected for making a determination of answer quality. A set of the first questions that are similar to the second question are identified from the plurality of first questions. First linking features between the identified set of first questions and their corresponding first answers are used for determining an analogy with second linking features between the second question and candidate answers for ranking the candidate answers.

Abstract: Disclosed herein are one or more embodiments that arrange a plurality of location entities into a hierarchy of location descriptors. One or more of the disclosed embodiments may determine whether one of the location entities is a spatial outlier based at least in part on presence of one or more other location entities within a predetermined distance of the one location entity. Also, the other location entities and the one location entity may share a location descriptor.

Abstract: A method for advertising in response to an image search. One or more keywords may be received. The keywords may be for searching one or more images on the network. The images may be retrieved based on the keywords. One or more advertisements may be selected based on a first visual content of the images and a second visual content of the one or more advertisements. The one or more of the advertisements may be displayed.

Abstract: A system for augmenting click-through data with latent information present in the click-through data for use in generating search results that are better tailored to the information needs of a user submitting a query is provided. The augmentation system creates a three-dimensional matrix with the dimensions of users, queries, and documents. The augmentation system then performs a three-order singular value decomposition of the three-dimensional matrix to generate a three-dimensional core singular value matrix and a left singular matrix for each dimension. The augmentation system finally multiplies the three-dimensional core singular value matrix by the left singular matrices to generate an augmented three-dimensional matrix that explicitly contains the information that was latent in the un-augmented three-dimensional matrix.

Abstract: A method and system for high-order co-clustering of objects of heterogeneous types is provided. A clustering system co-clusters objects of heterogeneous types based on joint distributions for objects of non-central types and objects of a central type. The clustering system uses an iterative approach to co-clustering the objects of the various types. The clustering system divides the co-clustering into a sub-problem, for each non-central type (e.g., first type and second type), of co-clustering objects of that non-central type and objects of the central type based on the joint distribution for that non-central type. After the co-clustering is completed, the clustering system clusters objects of the central type based on the clusters of the objects of the non-central types identified during co-clustering. The clustering system repeats the iterations until the clusters of objects of the central type converge on a solution.

Abstract: Method for making a recommendation to a first user in a computing network, including calculating one or more similarity scores between the first user and one or more remaining users in the network, identifying a portion of the remaining users having a highest similarity scores, identifying one or more locations visited by the portion of the remaining users but not by the first user, determining an interest level of the first user in each location, ranking the locations based on the interest levels, and displaying the locations based on the ranking as a first recommendation.

Abstract: A method and system for generating clusters of images for a search result of an image query is provided. When an original image query is received, the search system identifies text associated with the original image query by submitting the original image query to a search engine. The search system identifies phrases from the text of the web page containing the search result. The search system uses each of the identified phrases as an image query and submits the image queries to an image search engine. The search system considers the image search result for each image query to represent a cluster of related images. The search system then presents the clusters of images as the images of the image search result of the original image query.

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: Method for determining similarities between a first user and a second user in a network, including receiving one or more Global Positioning System (GPS) logs from each user in the network, constructing a first hierarchal graph for the first user's GPS log and a second hierarchical graph for the second user's GPS log, and calculating a similarity score between the first user and the second user based on the first hierarchal graph and the second hierarchical graph.

Abstract: A method and system for identifying sights associated with a location and for displaying images associated with those sights is provided. A tour system identifies sights associated with a location by submitting a search request formed using the location to an image search service. The tour system identifies salient phrases of metadata of the search results to be the candidate sight names. The tour system also provides a user interface for displaying the images associated with the locations. The user interface may present a slideshow of sights encountered when traveling on a trip.

Abstract: A method and system for projecting queries and images into a similarity space where queries are close to their relevant images is provided. A similarity space projection (“SSP”) system learns a query projection function and an image projection function based on training data. The query projection function projects the relevance of the most relevant words of a query into a similarity space and the image projection function projects the relevance to an image of the most relevant words of a query into the same similarity space so that queries and their relevant images are close in the similarity space. The SSP system can then identify images that are relevant to a target query and queries that are relevant to a target image using the projection functions.

Abstract: A method and system for calculating the significance of a sentence within a document is provided. The summarization system calculates the significance of the sentences of a document and selects the most significant sentences as the summary of the document. The summarization system calculates the significance of a sentence based on the “important” words of the document that are contained within the sentence. The summarization system calculates the importance of words of the document using various scoring techniques and then combines the scores to classify a word as important or not important. The summarization system can then be used to identify significant sentences of the document based on the important words that a sentence contains and select significant sentences as a summary of the document.

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: A method and system for providing a user interface for presenting images of clusters of an image search result is provided. The user interface system displays the search result in a cluster/view form using a cluster panel and a view panel. The cluster panel contains a cluster area for each cluster. The view panel may contain thumbnails of images of the search result in a list view or a mix view. When a user selects a cluster area from the cluster panel, the user interface system displays a list view of thumbnails for that cluster in the view panel. The user interface system may display a thumbnail list near a cluster area of the cluster panel. The thumbnail list contains mini-thumbnails of the images of the selected cluster. The user interface system may also display a detail view of an image in the view panel when a user selects an image.

Abstract: Systems and methods for related term suggestion are described. In one aspect, relationships among respective ones of two or more multi-type data objects are identified. The respective ones of the multi-type data objects include at least one object of a first type and at least one object of a second type that is different from the first type. The multi-type data objects are iteratively clustered in view of respective ones of the relationships to generate reinforced clusters.