Amazon Technologies, Inc.

A9.com, Inc.

Dan Catalin Teodorescu

Brent Mills

Blair Livingstone Hotchkies

Daniel R Parshall

Jason P Patrikios

Jennica Jane Pounds

David Aaron Lichterman

Paul Daniel Jaye

Alexandru I Indrei

Deepak Jain

Tevye Rachelson Krynski

Luis Alejandro Acosta

Calvin Yue-Ren Kuo

Amber Autrey Taylor

Aneeb Qureshi

Sikandar Saifullah

David James Roy Erdmann

Cyrus Khoshnevisan

Sean Phillip Forde

Zheshen Wang

Daniel Thomas Mellott

Stuart Olmstead-Wilcox

Kaigene Jennifer Lin

Tian Chen

Maher Alam Beg

Joshua Gene Slider

Zhaofeng Zhan

Jingyu Dong

Systems and methods are provided for detecting discrepancies in information that is displayed to a user across different webpages of an online shopping system. User interaction with the online shopping system is simulated in one example to collect data relating to webpages of the online shopping system. The data is analyzed to identify relevant semantic blocks of data and compare the data in those blocks across webpages. In an additional example, source code for the webpages is analyzed using machine-learning systems, which are targeted based on the results of the user interaction simulation to identify problematic source code and correct associated issues.

Detecting and correcting user interface discrepancies

Disclosed are various embodiments for synchronizing interactive content with a live video stream. Items featured or discussed during a segment of a live video stream are determined. A manifest is generated for the segment. The manifest includes locator information for obtaining the segment and item information indicating the items. The manifest is then sent to one or more clients.

Synchronizing interactive content with a live video stream

Aspects of server-side advertisement injection are described. In one embodiment, a computing device includes logic that receives a request for content from a client device. The logic identifies a targeted advertisement for a user of the client device based on information in the request. The logic further obtains a manifest file associated with the requested content, generates a second manifest file based on a combination of the first manifest file and the targeted advertisement, and transmits the second manifest file to the client device. Because the second manifest file includes references to clips of the content and the targeted advertisement, the client device can play back the content and advertisement without the necessary processing overhead required to manage client-side buffering and insertion of the advertisement within the content.

Server-side advertisement injection

Disclosed are various embodiments for navigating a taxonomy using search queries. An unstructured search query is parsed in order to identify one or more categories of a taxonomy of a collection of items. Each one of the one or more categories is associated with a confidence score. When the confidence score meets a threshold, a pool of items is selected from a respective one of the one or more categories. When no confidence score meets the threshold, the pool of items is selected from the collection of items.

Navigating a taxonomy using search queries

Techniques are described for providing rendition manifests for the playback of video content or other types of content on a user device. The response to a request for content may serially include data objects for one or more rendition manifests as Data Uniform Resource Indicators (URIs) or in another data format. By incorporating the data of the rendition manifest(s) in the response, implementations may forego a network request to retrieve the rendition manifest(s) and thus reduce the latency for presenting content. In some cases, the incorporated rendition manifest(s) may list locations for a subset of chunks of a content file, and the content may be marked as live content, to reduce the size of the response and further reduce latency. In some cases, locations for chunks from multiple content files may be included in a same set of one or more rendition manifests in the response.

Embedded manifests for content streaming

A method is described for selecting and caching a video advertisement to be presented on a client device. The method may include determining customer interests for an individual customer, selecting a video advertisement based upon the customer's interests and providing the video advertisement to a client device so that the video advertisement may be cached on the client device and may be available to display to a customer when a customer selects video content to play on the client device.

Video advertisement caching

Systems and methods described and suggested herein utilize various techniques to assess the degree of specificity of search queries. By assessing the degree of specificity of search queries, the systems and methods may be used to determine where the submitting users' intentions fall along the continuum between specific and general searching. Thus, the systems and methods may be used to, among other uses, deliver search results that more closely coincide with the users' intentions. For example, if data associated with a search query indicates that users typically submit the search query with the intention of specific searching, embodiments may tailor search results to include a limited number of highly relevant search-result items. On the other hand, for example, if data associated with a search query indicates that users typically submit the search query with the intention of general searching, embodiments may tailor search results to include a diverse set of search-result items from multiple categories.

Determining search query specificity

Disclosed are various embodiments for generating search results when a search string fails to return results as entered. In a representative example, a failure of a first query generated from a search string to identify at least a predefined threshold number of items from among a plurality of items in a data store is detected in a computing device. A plurality of altered versions of the search string is generated in the computing device. A submission of a plurality of second queries to the data store is implemented, where each of the second queries corresponds to one of the altered versions of the search string. A presentation is generated to be rendered of at least two separate groups of items resulting from corresponding ones of the second queries.

Implementation of a search for items

A collection of items may be categorized according to a category hierarchy. A search of the items may be explicitly associated with a particular category in the hierarchy or else unassociated. A set of refinements may be available, for example, to help narrow the search. Refinements may be applicable to items in linked categories. Refinements may be surfaced based at least in part on linked categories associated with the search. Refinements may be surfaced when the search is unassociated with a particular category. For example, a possibly relevant set of categories may be determined. Refinements may be surfaced according to a variety of ordering criteria.

Refinement surfacing for search hierarchies

Disclosed are various embodiments providing navigational aids within item search results. A pool of items is generated in a computing resource in response to a search query and a search context. At least one network page is encoded for rendering by a client. The at least one network page includes a ranked list of at least a portion of the items. The ranked list includes a navigational aid when a relevance score associated with the navigational aid meets a threshold. The relevance score is computed relative to respective relevance scores associated with items in the ranked list. The navigational aid has at least a same prominence within the ranked list as an item.

Navigational aids within item search results

Growing community of inventors

Shoreline, WA, United States of America

Dan Catalin Teodorescu