Ranking content based on relevance and quality

• US 20070174872A1
• Filed: 01/25/2006
• Published: 07/26/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 01/25/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Ma, Wei-Ying, Zhang, Lei, Jing, Feng
• Granted Patent: US 7,836,050 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 725/46
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/50 of still image data
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9538 Presentation of query results
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/252 Processing of multiple end-users' preferences to derive collaborative data
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/2665 Gathering content from different sources, e.g. Internet and satellite
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4312 involving specific graphical features, e.g. screen layout, special fonts or colors, blinking icons, highlights or animations
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/47 End-user applications
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/4826 using recommendation lists, e.g. of programs or channels sorted out according to their score
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/84 Generation or processing of descriptive data, e.g. content descriptors systems specially adapted for using meta-information in broadcast systems H04H60/73

Abstract

A method and system for ranking content and providing a user interface for viewing the content is provided. The content system ranks content in a search result based on a combination of relevance of the content to a query and quality of the content. The content system may derive the quality of content by analyzing ratings provided by various content forums. The content system may use metadata provided by a content forum when searching for content that matches a query. The content system generates a rank score that combines the relevance and quality of the content and ranks the content according to the rank scores.

Claims

1. A computing system for ranking items of results, comprising:

a result store providing an indication of the items of a result;

a relevance store providing a relevance for each item of the result;

a quality store providing a quality for each item of the result; and

a generate score component that generates a score for each item based on a combination of the relevance and the quality for the item.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein the items are images.

3. The system of claim 1 wherein the quality of an item is based on a rating of the item provided by users who reviewed the item.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the quality of an item is based on a computer-generated rating of the item.

5. The system of claim 1 wherein the items of the result are selected based on a user query and the relevance of an item is based on relatedness of the item to the user query.

6. The system of claim 1 including a display component that displays an indication of the items in an order based on the generated scores.

7. The system of claim 6 wherein the items are images and the indication of an image is a thumbnail of the image and wherein the display component displays a fisheye view of the images when a user selects an image.

8. The system of claim 1 wherein the items are images and the quality of an item is derived from ratings of an image forum.

9. The system of claim 8 wherein the ratings of different image forums are normalized.

10. The system of claim 8 wherein the ratings of duplicate images from different image forums are used to generate a transform for ratings of different image forums.

11. A computing system for ranking images of a result of a query, comprising:

a result collection providing an indication of images of the result of the query;

a relevance collection providing a relevance for each image of the result that indicates the relevance of the image to the query;

a quality collection providing a quality for each image of the result of the query; and

a generate score component that generates a score for each image based on the relevance and the quality for the image.

12. The system of claim 11 including a component that generates a quality for each image and stores the quality for each image in the quality collection.

13. The system of claim 12 wherein the component that generates the quality of an image generates the quality based on ratings of images provided by an image forum.

14. The system of claim 12 wherein the component that generates the quality of an image generates the quality based on a computer-generated rating of the image.

15. The system of claim 11 including a component that displays a thumbnail of the images of the result and displays a fisheye view of the images when a user selects an image.

16. The system of claim 11 wherein the rating of an image is adjusted based on the ratings differences between image forums as indicated by ratings of duplicate images.

17. A computer-readable medium containing instructions for controlling a computing system to rank images of a result of a query, by a method comprising:

determining a quality for each image of the result of the query; and

generating a score for each image based on the quality for the image and relevance of the image to the query.

18. The computer-readable medium of claim 17 wherein the quality of the image is based on ratings of images provided by an image forum.

19. The computer-readable medium of claim 18 including displaying an indication of the images in an order based on the generated scores.

20. The computer-readable medium of claim 18 wherein the rating of an image is adjusted based on the ratings differences between image forums as indicated by ratings of duplicate images.