Method and apparatus for intranet searching

• US 20060085397A1
• Filed: 10/15/2004
• Published: 04/20/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 10/15/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: D'Urso, Mark S.
• Granted Patent: US 8,595,223 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/24578 using ranking
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

A method for processing an intranet includes crawling the intranet to identify at least some of the pages in the intranet, and determining, for each identified page, a number of links in a shortest path from a root page to the identified page.

Claims

1. A method for processing an intranet comprising a plurality of pages including at least one root page, the method comprising acts of:

(A) crawling the intranet to identify at least some of the plurality of pages in the intranet; and

(B) determining, for at least one identified page, a number of links in a shortest path from the at least one root page to the identified page.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising an act of:

(C) storing information for the at least one identified page indicating the number of links in the shortest path from the at least one root page to the identified page, the information specifying a hierarchical level for the identified page in the intranet.

3. The method of claim 2, further comprising an act (D) of defining a subject matter specificity level for the identified page in correlation to the hierarchical level of the identified page.

4. The method of claim 3, wherein the subject matter specificity level has a greater valve for an identified page having a greater number of links in its shortest path from the at least one root page relative to a value for an identified page having a fewer number of links in its shortest path from the at least one root page.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising an act (C) of selecting a plurality of conceptual pages to be a plurality of root pages.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the act (C) comprises crawling the intranet by beginning a plurality of crawls through the intranet starting from each of the plurality of root pages.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the act (A) comprises an act of identifying all of the plurality of pages in the intranet.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein at least one of the plurality of pages comprises HTML formatting.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the intranet is associated with a Web site.

10. The method of claim 1, further comprising an act (C) of determining a reverse page level associated with the number of links in the shortest path for each identified page.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising an act (D) excluding pages of the identified pages having a shortest path with a number of links less than a threshold number of links.

12. The method of claim 1, further comprising an act (C) of parsing each page of the plurality of pages to identify any terms in the page.

13. The method of claim 12, further comprising an act (D) of determining, for each identified term, a distance from a root node of the page.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising an act (E) of storing information, for each identified term, indicating the distance from the root, the information specifying a hierarchical level for the identified term in the page.

15. The method of claim 1, further comprising an act of (C) determining a specificity of a query, the specificity of the query having an inverse relationship to a potential number of pages returned in response to the query.

16. The method of claim 15, further comprising an act (D) of returning, in response to the query, pages of the identified pages having a level of specificity associated with the level of specificity of the query.

17. The method of claim 16, wherein the act (D) comprises listing the returned pages in an order correlated to the level of specificity of the returned pages.