USE OF OFF-PAGE CONTENT TO ENHANCE CAPTIONS WITH ADDITIONAL RELEVANT INFORMATION

• US 20130086041A1
• Filed: 10/03/2011
• Published: 04/04/2013
• Est. Priority Date: 10/03/2011
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Thazhathekalam, Krishnan, Simpson, David, Ahn, David D., Burbank, Andrea, Salvetti, Franco, Jewell, Christopher Jon
• Granted Patent: US 9,009,143 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/722
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0251 Targeted advertisements

Abstract

Architecture that uses content from off-page data sources such as feeds (e.g., yellow pages, coupons, social networks, commerce, etc.) to present additional, relevant information in association with search results. The additional and relevant information is directly relevant to the implicit task the user is trying to accomplish. The architecture includes online and offline mechanisms that identify an entity represented on a web page and look-up information related to that entity in disparate data sources. Relevance heuristics are employed to determine which of the available entity data to show in the caption given the user query, the web page, and the underlying user task (other known information about the user such as geographic location).

Claims

1. A computer-implemented system, comprising:

a data component that responds to processing of a query and operates to identify entities represented as content elements on target webpages related to the query, the data component obtains additional entity data comprising at least one of concepts or content determined to be relevant to the entities from disparate on-page data sources and off-page data sources to use in a search result;

a presentation component for presenting the additional entity data in a caption accompanying the search result; and

a processor that executes computer-executable instructions associated with the data component.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the data component comprises an offline component that collects entity data associated with entities from the off-page data sources and stores the collected entity data in a search content index.

3. The system of claim 2, wherein the data component comprises an online component that retrieves collected entity data from the off-page data sources and applies a relevance heuristic to determine on-page data and off-page data to use in association with the search result.

4. The system of claim 3, wherein the online component retrieves the collected entity data at runtime and sends a realtime call to an appropriate data source for additional entity data of an entity.

5. The system of claim 2, wherein the offline component groups the entities based on an identifier of the target webpage.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein the data component inserts the entity data into a cached copy of an identifier in the search content index.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein the data component employs a relevance heuristic to determine entity data to show in the search result based on the query, a target webpage, and underlying user task.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the off-page data sources are external feeds.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the presentation component comprises an engine for assembling the search result that presents the relevant content of the on-page data source and the off-page data sources in the search result.

10. A computer-implemented method, comprising acts of:

processing a search query related to an underlying user task of a user;

identifying entities represented as content elements in corresponding target webpages based on the search query;

retrieving off-page entity data from an off-page data source, the off-page entity data comprising at least one of concepts or content determined to be related to the entities;

presenting the off-page entity data in association with a search result of the query; and

utilizing a processor that executes instructions stored in memory to perform at least one of the acts of processing, identifying, retrieving, or presenting.

11. The method of claim 10, further comprising retrieving the entity data for presentation in the search result with on-page entity data.

12. The method of claim 10, further comprising applying a relevance heuristic to the entity data to determine a portion of the entity data to present.

13. The method of claim 10, further comprising applying an importance heuristic to the entity data to determine importance criteria of each of the entity data.

14. The method of claim 10, further comprising storing the entity data in a content index in association with a webpage source identifier.

15. The method of claim 10, further comprising retrieving the off-page entity data based on geographical location of the user.

16. A computer-implemented method, comprising acts of:

processing a query related to an underlying user task of a user;

identifying an entity represented in a corresponding target webpage based on the query;

retrieving off-page entity data related to the entity and on-page entity data related to the entity, the off-page data being retrieved from an off-page data source;

applying heuristics to the off-page entity data and on-page entity data to determine entity data to present;

presenting the entity data in association with a search result of the query; and

utilizing a processor that executes instructions stored in memory to perform at least one of the acts of processing, identifying, retrieving, applying, or presenting.

17. The method of claim 16, further comprising indexing the on-page entity data and off-page entity data in a content index according to resource identifier of the target webpage.

18. The method of claim 16, further comprising grouping the off-page entity data and on-page entity data based on resource identifier of the target webpage.

19. The method of claim 16, further comprising caching copies of resource identifiers and associated entity data for retrieval.

20. The method of claim 16, further comprising extracting off-page entity data from off-page data sources based on an entity key.