Enhancing freshness of search results

• US 9,116,990 B2
• Filed: 05/27/2010
• Issued: 08/25/2015
• Est. Priority Date: 05/27/2010
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Inventors: Sun, Walter, Deshpande, Vinay Sudhir, Yu, Yinzhe, Singh, Abhishek, Goyal, Jay Kumar, Li, Jingfeng, Ledbetter, Thomas Arthur, Guo, Lin, Ahmed, Junaid, Singh, Brahm Kiran
• Primary Examiner(s): Yen, Syling
• Application Number:
  US12/789,020
• Publication Number:
  US 20110295844A1
• Time in Patent Office: 1,916 Days
• Field of Search: 707/706, 707/713, 707722-728, 707/736, 707/758, 707/781, 707999003-999006
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/345 Summarisation for human users
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 10/00 Administration; Management

Abstract

Methods, systems, and computer-storage media for improving the freshness, or the apparent freshness, of search results are described. In an embodiment, the first portion of search results presented on a search results page are based on responsiveness to the search query and a second portion of results describe only recently published documents that are responsive to the search query. In an embodiment, a more recent version of the document, which is not directly used to determine responsiveness, is used to build the caption for a search result. Another way to make search results appear fresh is to include a publication time within the search result caption. In one embodiment, the publication time is generated by calculating a point in time between when a document is first added to a search index and the previous time the search engine visited the site where the document was found.

Claims

1. One or more computer-storage memory devices having computer-executable instructions embodied thereon that when executed by a computing device, perform a method of featuring recently published documents within search results, the method comprising:

receiving a search query from a user;

identifying a first plurality of documents that are responsive to the search query because a portion of the search query matches one or more portions of the documents;

determining that an intent of the user to receive recently published documents is ambiguous by calculating a freshness score for the search query, wherein the freshness score is based on how many recently published documents are responsive to the search query, and by determining that the freshness score for the search query falls into a designated range bounded by a low-threshold score and a high-threshold score;

displaying, on a search results page, the first plurality of search results; and

upon said determining, that the freshness score for the search query falls into a designated range bounded by the low-threshold score and the high-threshold score, displaying, on the search results page with the first plurality of search results, a second plurality of search results that describe documents published less than a designated period of time from the present.

2. The memory device of claim 1, wherein said determining also comprises determining that the search query is not a news query by analyzing the search query with a news classifier.

3. The memory device of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises displaying a heading between the first plurality of search results and the second plurality of search results that describes the second plurality of search results as presenting recently published documents.

4. The memory device of claim 1, wherein the documents are webpages.

5. The memory device of claim 1, wherein the calculating is based on an amount of high-quality matches with documents that are indexed within a recent document index, wherein the recent document index includes documents that have been published within the designated period of time.

6. The memory device of claim 1, wherein the method further comprises displaying a publication time with one or more of the search results within the second plurality of search results, and wherein the publication time indicates when a document described by a search result was published.

7. The memory device of claim 6, wherein the method further comprises calculating the publication time for the document based on when the document was first indexed by a search engine and a previous time the document'"'"'s location was visited by the search engine, and wherein the document was not available at the previous time.

8. The memory device of claim 7, wherein the publication time is calculated without parsing the document for text indicating when the document was published.

9. A method of including recent document changes in search result captions, the method comprising:

receiving a search query;

identifying a first plurality of documents that are responsive to the search query because a portion of the search query matches one or more portions of the documents;

calculating a freshness score for the search query, wherein the calculating is based on an amount of high-quality matches with documents that are indexed within a fresh index;

determining that the freshness score falls into a designated range bounded by a low-threshold score and a high-threshold score, wherein the designated range is set to include scores that indicate an ambiguous intention of the user to receive recently published documents;

using information describing the documents, storing the first plurality of documents in a main index that is updated within a first time interval;

determining that a document within the first plurality of documents stored in the main index, is also indexed in the fresh index that is updated within a second time interval, wherein the second time interval is shorter than the first time interval, thereby populating the fresh index with newer versions of documents;

generating a search result caption, for the document stored in the main index and the fresh index, that describes the document using content from the document'"'"'s index entry within the fresh index; and

upon said determining that the freshness score falls within the designated range, displaying, the search result caption for the document stored in the main index and the fresh index, within a group of search result captions, wherein each search result caption in the group of search result captions describes a respective document in the first plurality of documents.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the search result caption includes a title and a snippet built suing text taken from and stored in an index entry that describes the document.

11. The method of claim 9, wherein the search result caption includes a publication time for the document described by the search result caption, and wherein the method further comprises:

visiting an online location at a first point in time;

analyzing a content available at the online location at the first point in time;

visiting the online location at a second point in time;

indexing the document, which was available at the second point in time, but not the first point in time; and

calculating the publication time for the document by adding half a difference in time between the first point in time and the second point in time to the first point in time.

12. The method of claim 11, wherein said calculating the publication time is completed without parsing the document to identify a stated publication time for the document.

13. The method of claim 9, further comprising determining that content of an index entry for the document in the main index is different than content of an index entry for the document in the fresh index.

14. The method of claim 9, wherein the determining further comprises determining that the search query is not a news query by analyzing the search query with a news classifier.

15. The method of claim 9, wherein the document is one or more of a webpage, a blog entry, a microblog entry, and a social media page.

16. The method of claim 9, further comprising displaying a publication time with the search result caption for the document stored in the fresh index.

17. A computer system for executing a computerized method for featuring recently published documents within a search results page, the system comprising:

a user interface component that generates a user interface for display on the user'"'"'s computing device and that receives a search query from the user through the user interface;

a query-processing component that identifies a first plurality of documents that are responsive to the search query because a portion of the search query matches one or more portions of the first plurality of documents, wherein when an intent of the user is determined to be ambiguous, it is configured to display, on the user interface, the first plurality of documents with a second plurality of search results that describe documents published less than a designated period of time from the present; and

a query freshness component that determines whether the intent of the user to receive recently published documents is ambiguous by calculating the freshness score for the search query and by determining that the freshness score for the search query falls into a designated range bounded by a low-threshold score and a high-threshold score, wherein the freshness score is based on how many recently published documents are responsive to the search query.

18. The system of claim 17, wherein the query-processing component determining further comprises a news-classifier component.

19. The system of claim 17, wherein at least the first plurality documents are one or more of a webpage, a blog entry, a microblog entry, and a social media page.

20. The system of claim 17, further comprising one or more crawlers for building at least a main index of documents.