Apple Inc.

A9.com, Inc.

Yahoo! Inc.

Excalibur Ip, LLC

Daniel Eric Rose

Jeremy J Bornstein

Douglass R Cutting

Jianchang Mao

Anil A Sewani

John D Hatton

Zhichen Xu

Yin Yin Wong

Susan L Booker

Gitta B Salomon

Richard I Mander

Timothy R Oren

Stephanie L Houde

Kevin Tiene

Matthew W Amacker

Qi Lu

Eckart Walther

Blair Livingstone Hotchkies

Farzin Maghoul

David Ku

Brent Mills

Chung-Man Tam

Daniel R Parshall

Jason P Patrikios

Francois Huet

Alexandru I Indrei

William W Luciw

James Clinton Spohrer

Arthur James

Michael A Arent

Abe Taha

Alexander A Stepanov

Mark Leslie Miller

Anil Gangolli

James M Laffey

Pavel Berkhim

James Reginald Winkles

Paramjit S Oberoi

Gregory J Czora

Catherine Anne Abbott

Ryan Jacob Ernst

Brent Robert Mills

Dulce Beatriz Ponceleon

Albert Riley Howard

Chad P Walters

Pavel Berkhin

Anjan Goswami

Peter Anick

Swati Raju

Raymond Chung-Man Tam

Richard B Hoiberg

David Kirk Evans

Gerard Fliedner

Gerhard Fliedner

Swaminathan Sundaramurthy

Anuradha Subramanian

François Huet

Daniel Eugene Field

Christian Martin Riblet

Michael Monan

Curtis Stevens

Dulce B Poncele&oacute;n

Dulce B Ponceleón

Methods and systems for providing dynamic and category specific search suggestions are provided. According to one embodiment, a partial search query entered by a user can be used to determine a set of relevant search queries, which can be displayed as search suggestions within a search query suggestion window. Each query in the list can be associated with at least one specific category. According to various embodiments, the set of relevant queries and associated categories are dynamically updated as the user modifies the partial search query. Furthermore, each category is selectable by the user such that a detailed list of items associated only with the selected category can be displayed to the user.

Dynamic search suggestion and category specific completion

The relevance or ranking of various dynamically-determined instances of content can be adjusted or otherwise improved based on aspects such as the freshness or seasonality of the content. In many conventional relevance or ranking algorithms, factors such as popularity, performance, and profit are used to determine which content to present to a user, as well as how to display the selected content. Such algorithms do not necessarily reflect domain-specific knowledge very well, and thus fail to accurately select content that is of differing levels appeal at various ages of the content and/or during various seasons of the year. Freshness and/or seasonality adjustment scores can be used to generate improved relevance, selection, or ranking determinations for various categories of content.

Freshness and seasonality-based content determinations

The present invention is directed towards systems and methods for trust propagation. The method according to one embodiment comprises calculating a first feature vector for a first user, calculating a second feature for a second user and comparing the first feature vector with the second feature vector to calculate a similarity value. A determination is made as to whether the similarity value falls within a threshold. If the similarity value falls within the threshold, a relationship is recorded between the first user and the second user in a first user profile and a second user profile.

Trust propagation through both explicit and implicit social networks

Embodiments provide methods and systems for encoding and decoding variable-length data, which may include methods for encoding and decoding search engine posting lists. Embodiments may include different encoding formats including group unary, packed unary, and/or packed binary formats. Some embodiments may utilize single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions that may perform a parallel shuffle operation on encoded data as part of the decoding processes. Some embodiments may utilize lookup tables to determine shuffle sequences and/or masks and/or shifts to be utilized in the decoding processes. Some embodiments may utilize hybrid formats.

Encoding of variable-length data with unary formats

Decoding of variable-length data with group formats

Substrings within strings, such as words within words, are identified based at least in part on recorded behavior of users that have submitted the strings or substrings as search queries. The behavior may relate to actions taken by the users upon having submitting the search queries. The actions may be actions taken in connection with an electronic marketplace, such as actions related to the consumption of items offered in the electronic marketplace. The identified strings and corresponding substrings are used in connection with processing search queries. The strings and substrings may be used to update a search index and/or to modify received search queries for processing.

Behavioral word segmentation for use in processing search queries

User behavior data can be used with language-specific rule sets to generate stemming databases useful for such tasks as indexing and search query processing. The terms contained in user queries, as well as user behavior with respect to those queries or results returned for those queries, can be analyzed to determine a relative measure (e.g., relative frequency) of various forms of those terms. When generating a stemming database, language-specific rule sets can be used to determine appropriate stemming rules, and where more than one potential rule is identified the user behavior data can be used to select what is likely the appropriate rule, at least for the respective environment. Whitelists or other such components can be used to handle specific or irregular forms that do not follow the general rules or otherwise are exceptions that might not otherwise be processed correctly.

Behavior-driven multilingual stemming

A search facility may optimize search result ranking by applying inverted decay transformations to history-dependent ranking components. Ranking scores for content in a content collection may be based on a set of ranking components including history-dependent ranking components. History-dependent ranking components may be based on historical behavioral data such as historical searches, actions taken with respect to content such as viewing content and content-related purchases. Content recently added to the content collection may be disadvantaged relative to content with an established history. Inverted decay transformations may correspond to simulations of additional historical behavioral data.

Recent content rank adjustment with inverted decay

Embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for ranking a result set. The method according to one embodiment comprises selecting an item from the result set, selecting a user profile from one or more user profiles and selecting one or more items of personalized information from the selected user profile. A rank is calculated for the item on the basis of the selected one or more items of personalized information and the selected item in the result set is ranked in accordance with the calculated rank.

Search engine with augmented relevance ranking by community participation

A method and apparatus for organizing information in a computer filing system. The method and apparatus include the creation of a pile comprising a collection of documents and displaying a graphical representation of the collection of documents. The method and apparatus further include browsing the collection of documents by pointing a cursor at a particular item in the collection of documents to reveal an indicia for the particular item in the collection of documents. The filing system can automatically divide a pile (e.g. a collection of documents from an electronic mail network) into subpiles on the basis of the content of each document in the pile, and the filing system, at the user's request can automatically file away documents into existing piles in the computer system on the basis of a similarity match between the content (or other internal representation) of the document and the content (or other internal representation) of existing piles in the computer system. The filing system can also create a pile from a sample document by using the internal representation of the document as the internal representation of the new pile. The computer filing system provides various interfaces in connection with piles to the user of the system to provide feedback and other information to the user, including information concerning the documents and piles in the computer's filing system.

Method and apparatus for organizing information in a computer system

Techniques for automatically generating and displaying topic-focused summaries for search results are disclosed. Users can 'peek' inside a search result to see document excerpts that pertain specifically to a user-selected topic. Thus, a user can view the aspects of a document that are most interesting prior to deciding whether to retrieve the complete document. For each search result, a user can select from among several different available summaries, each of which focuses on a different topic of the document to which that search result refers. According to one aspect, key concepts are automatically identified in a document. For each such key concept, contextual snippets that pertain to that key concept are automatically selected. The key concepts are displayed to the user at search time. A summary that contains the contextual snippets that pertain to a user-selected key concept is displayed in response to the user's selection of that key concept.

Topic-focused search result summaries

A real-time interactive document summarization system which allows the user to continuously control the amount of detail to be included in a document summary.

Interactive document summarization

Growing community of inventors

Cupertino, CA, United States of America

Daniel Eric Rose