ENTERPRISE SEARCH OVER PRIVATE AND PUBLIC DATA

• US 20120233209A1
• Filed: 03/09/2011
• Published: 09/13/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 03/09/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Cheng, Lili, Huang, Xuedong David, Shum, Heung-Yeung, Horvitz, Erik J., Newman, Todd D., Taniguchi, David S., Lewallen, James H.
• Granted Patent: US 9,043,358 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/770
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/22 Indexing; Data structures therefor; Storage structures

Abstract

A unified search service may collect information related to an enterprise from at least one of publicly available data and private enterprise data. In some implementations, crowd sourcing may be used to determine a source list of one or more sources of information. Authored content can be generated, such as by combining one or more items of information from the public data with one or more items of information from the private enterprise data. Further, in some implementations, a public index may be generated from the public data, and one or more affiliation indexes may be generated from the private enterprise data. For example, a first affiliation index may contain confidential enterprise information, while a second affiliation index may contain non-confidential enterprise information. A user'"'"'s affiliation to the enterprise may be taken into consideration when determining which indexes to use when responding to a search request from the user.

Claims

1. A method comprising:

under control of one or more processors configured with executable instructions,

obtaining first information related to an enterprise from one or more public online sources;

obtaining second information related to the enterprise from one or more private enterprise sources;

generating combined information by combining a portion of the first information related to a particular subject with a portion of the second information related to the particular subject; and

providing the combined information to one or more user devices.

2. The method as recited in claim 1, further comprising providing the combined information as a search result page to the one or more user devices in response to a search query, received from the user device, related to the particular subject.

3. The method as recited in claim 1, further comprising providing the combined information to a user device in an RSS (really simple syndication) feed related to the particular subject.

4. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein generating the combined information further comprises generating the combined information as a viewable page of content for presentation by a browser of a user device.

5. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein:

generating the combined information includes cross referencing the first information with the second information to identify items of information related to the particular subject and automatically or semi-automatically authoring authored content related to the particular subject; and

the authored content includes the portion of the first information obtained from the one or more public online sources and the portion of the second information obtained from the private enterprise sources.

6. The method as recited in claim 7, wherein the authored content is automatically or semi-automatically authored based on one or more filters or keywords applied to the portion of the first information obtained from the one or more public online sources and the portion of the second information obtained from the enterprise intranet.

7. The method as recited in claim 1, wherein obtaining the first information related to the enterprise from one or more public online sources includes obtaining the first information from at least one of:

publicly available social network feeds;

publicly available microblog feeds;

publicly available RSS (really simple syndication) feeds;

publicly available news sources;

or

publicly available blog sources.

8. The method as recited in claim 1, further comprising determining a relevancy of the portion of the first information and the portion of the second information based on an identity of an author or source.

9. The method as recited in claim 1, further comprising:

obtaining at least one of the first information or the second information based on a source list that identifies sources for at least one of the first information or the second information; and

providing a user interface for enabling a plurality of users to add or delete sources from the source list, the source list including a history of changes to the sources made by the plurality of users.

10. The method as recited in claim 1, further comprising:

generating a plurality of searchable indexes from the second information obtained related to the enterprise from the one or more private enterprise sources, wherein a first index includes confidential enterprise information and a second index is free of confidential enterprise information;

receiving a search query directed to the particular subject from a user device of a user;

determining an affiliation of the user with the enterprise;

based on whether the affiliation enables the user to access confidential enterprise information, selecting either the first index or the second index or the second index for responding to the search query;

generating the combined information, using either the first index or the second index select for responding, by combining the portion of the first information related to the particular subject with the portion of the second information related to the particular subject; and

providing the combined information to the user device.

11. A computing device comprising:

one or more processors in operable communication with computer-readable media;

at least one affiliation index maintained on the computer-readable media that includes information related to an enterprise; and

a unified search service component executed on the one or more processors to perform operations comprising;

receiving a search query from a user;

determining an affiliation of the user;

based on the affiliation, using the affiliation index to determine relevant information related to the enterprise in response to the query; and

returning the relevant information to the user in response to the query.

12. The computing device as recited in claim 11, the operations further comprising applying the search query to a public index of information relevant to the enterprise collected from public sources, wherein returning the relevant information further comprises returning relevant information from both the public index and the affiliation index.

13. The computing device as recited in claim 11, wherein determining the affiliation of the user further comprises determining whether the user is an employee of the enterprise.

14. The computing device as recited in claim 11, the operations further comprising generating the affiliation index from private information available on an intranet of the enterprise.

15. The computing device as recited in claim 11, wherein the at least one affiliation index comprises a first affiliation index that contains confidential enterprise information obtained from private enterprise sources and a second affiliation index that contains non-confidential information obtained from the private enterprise sources.

16. The computing device as recited in claim 15, the operations further comprising:

determining that the user does not have a demonstrated affiliation with the enterprise; and

using the second affiliation index to determine information relevant to the request.

17. The computing device as recited in claim 15, the operations further comprising:

determining that the user does have a demonstrated affiliation with the enterprise; and

using the first affiliation index to determine information relevant to the request.

18. One or more computer-readable media having instructions stored thereon executable by a processor to perform operations comprising:

providing a user interface for enabling a plurality of users to add sources of information to a source list or delete sources of information from the source list; and

collecting information from the sources of information in the source list, the sources of information comprising at least one of;

one or more private enterprise sources;

or

one or more public sources; and

providing the collected information to one or more users of the plurality of users.

19. One or more computer-readable media as recited in claim 18, the operations further comprising providing, in the user interface, a history of the source list accessible by the plurality of users, the history showing changes to the source list made by one or more users of the plurality of users, the changes including at least one of:

sources of information added to the source list by one or more of the users;

or

sources of information deleted from the source list by one or more of the users.

20. One or more computer-readable media as recited in claim 18, the operation of providing the collected information to the one or more users further comprising at least one of:

providing authored content based on the sources of information in the source list, the authored content generated by combining a first item of information related to a particular subject from the collected information and a second item of information related to the particular subject from the collected information;

or

generating one or more indexes based on the sources of information in the source list, the one or more indexes being generated from the collected information and being searchable for providing search results to the one or more users.