Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Abhas Kumar

Pratibha Permandla

Gaurav Sareen

Anna Timasheva

Deepak Shankar

Yinzhe Yu

Guarav Sareen

Systems and methods for regularly updating portions of a merged index are provided. Initially, upon receiving an indication that modifications have occurred to content of web-based documents, dynamic update of index (DUI) objects that identify the documents and expose the modified content are composed by ascertaining relative positions of the modified content within the documents, and packaging identifiers of the documents, the relative positions, and metadata underlying the modified content into a message. The DUI objects are applied to an overloading index that maintains structured records of recent modifications. In particular, portions of the overloading index are targeted utilizing the document identifiers and the relative positions specified by the DUI object, thereby updating the targeted portions within the overloading index corresponding to the modified content without rewriting the entire overloading index. Periodically, an association process is invoked for grouping the merged index with the overloading index for search purposes.

Updating an inverted index in a real time fashion

Systems and methods for performing an updating process to an in-memory index are provided. Upon receiving notice of document modifications covered by an inverted index associated with a search engine, in the form of an update file, a representation of the modification is published onto various index serving machines. Each index serving machine receiving the update file determines if the modifications are applicable to the index serving machine. If an index serving machine determines that it contains mapping information corresponding to the modified documents, the index serving machine utilizes the update file and associated mapping information to update an in-memory index. In embodiments, the in-memory index is used to provide results to user queries in tandem with the inverted index. In some embodiments, an extra in-memory index is maintained that is revised with constantly incoming metadata updates and the existing in-memory index is periodically swapped with the revised in-memory index.

Rapid update of index metadata

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Abhas Kumar