Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Dean A Slawson

Raman Chandrasekar

Michael K Forney

Matthew Robert Scott

Jing Zhao

Arungunram Chandrasekaran Surendran

Erin L Renshaw

Gregory Scott Lindhorst

Daniel J Makoski

Imran Aziz

Doron Bar-Caspi

Piali Choudhury

Nichol C Viton

Ramen Chandrasekar

Dharmarajan Ratnagiri Ayakkad

In-application customization is provided where users can both use and customize the application. Within a graphical user interface of an application developed by an original author, an interaction from a customizer user of the application can be received to make a modification to the application from a set of available modifications that the original author did not create for the application. The modification can be performed using functionality made available through a developer program service.

In-application customization

Domain specific topics, and optionally uniform resource locators (URLs) can be received from a user, and from those domain specific topics and URLs, domain tuned search definitions are generated for a given domain. The domain tuned search definitions are saved and the user is provided with a definition of a domain tuned search interface that is embedded on a site specified by the user. When someone reviewing the user's web site performs a search using the domain tuned, embedded search interface, a search engine is invoked which performs a search on the user's input query, and then returns domain specific search results. The search engine searches for domain specific search results over web sites in addition to the web site that the user is currently reviewing, so the search is more precise than a general web search but broader than a specific site search.

Creating business value by embedding domain tuned search on web-sites

A user interface display for software has a user satisfaction portion displayed on each page. The user satisfaction portion includes a user selectable element which allows a user to provide a user satisfaction score (or level) with a single mouse click. In response to receiving the user satisfaction level, the context of the software which the user is using is recorded, and the user satisfaction level is correlated to that context. The captured data can be provided to application designers and developers directly or via computed metrics.

User feedback correlated to specific user interface or application features

The claimed subject matter provides systems and/or techniques that effectuate combining domain-tuned search systems. The system can include mechanisms that obtain queries, written descriptions, or illustrative web-pages regarding a particular area of interest, and generate a definition related to the area of interest. The definition contains a list of paths with associated weights employed to identify an pre-established first domain-tuned search system related to the area of interest. The first domain-tuned search system thereafter can be combined with a second domain-tuned search system related to another area of interest and presented to a user for utilization in re-ranking generic search results to be specific to the first and second domains of interest if combined, or to only the first domain if weights for the second domain are logically subtracted.

Combining domain-tuned search systems

An information dissemination system ranks the search results based on a temporal weight assigned to each search result. The temporal weight is an indication of the importance to a user that varies with time. For each search result, the information dissemination system calculates a temporal weight that is based on the temporal proximity of the event that is related to the search result. The temporal weight may be used to re-rank the search results.

Temporal ranking of search results

An information dissemination system provides users information related to topics extracted from event classes. Event classes can generally be thought of as scripts that specify topics and actions for obtaining information related to the topics. The event classes are executed to obtain information related to the particular event class. The information dissemination system identifies a user event that is of interest to a user. The information dissemination system then identifies an event class that corresponds to the user event. The information dissemination system then performs the actions specified for the event class, obtains the action results, and renders the action results to the user.

Presenting information related to topics extracted from event classes

An information dissemination system identifies the interests of a user from information derived from various sources, such as, by way of example, the user's calendar entries, emails, World Wide Web (web) usage information, documents, enterprise resource planning (ERP) data, and the like. The information dissemination system then creates a profile for the user, and includes in the profile the details about the user's interests including the information sources to query, the user events which were analyzed to determine the user's interest, the topics derived from the analyzed events, the queries generated for the analyzed events, a language model of terms that are relevant to the user, and other information regarding the user. The information dissemination system then periodically executes the queries against the appropriate information sources, ranks the search results obtained from executing the queries, and renders the ranked search results to the user.

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Beijing, China

Dean A Slawson