Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Eytan D Seidman

Eric Benjamin Watson

Darren Arthur Shakib

Jonathan A Forbes

Robert Michael Dolin

Michael I Torres

Kenneth Alan Moss

Keith Andrew Birney

Andrew Samuel Laucius

Nikhil Singhal

Searches can be performed by attaching social contact metadata to a query where the metadata may be related to a degree of separation, chat room participation and geographical information related to an owner's contacts. Searches can then be executed by generalized search engines based at least in part on the metadata. The metadata may include contact identifiers that are unique across one or more social networks, and may include contacts for individual people as well as groups or other affiliations.

Searching with metadata comprising degree of separation, chat room participation, and geography

The subject invention provides for systems and methods that visually enhance paid inclusion listings to facilitate offering a clear and substantial value to paid inclusion advertisers while retaining ordering rights to keep listings relevant to users. More specifically, the systems and methods allow paid inclusion listings to be visually modified at the discretion of the advertiser, the user, and/or the search service provider (e.g., publisher of search results) to facilitate differentiation among advertisers, companies, and the like. The ordering of the enhanced paid inclusion listings is not compromised based on the number or type of enhancement selected by the paid inclusion customer. A search service provider or search result publisher ('service provider') can offer a plurality, or at least one, of different types of enhancements to paid inclusion customers ('advertisers') to affect the rendering of any paid inclusion listing to the user.

Paid inclusion listing enhancement

A system and method facilitating incremental web crawl(s) using chunk(s) is provided. The system can be employed, for example, to facilitate a web-crawling system that crawls (e.g., continuously) the Internet for information (e.g., data) and indexes the information so that it can be used as part of a web search engine. The system facilitates incremental re-crawls and/or selective updating of information (e.g., documents) using a structure called a chunk to simplify the process of an incremental crawl. A chunk is a set of documents that can be manipulated as a set (e.g., of up to 65,536 (64K) documents). 'Document' refers to a corpus of data that is stored at a particular URL (e.g., HTML, PDF, PS, PPT, XLS, and/or DOC Files etc.) A chunk is created by an indexer. The indexer can place into a chunk documents that have similar property(ies). These property(ies) include but are not limited to: average time between change and average importance. These property(ies) can be stored at the chunk level in a chunk map. The chunk map can then be employed (e.g., on a daily basis) to determine which chunk(s) should be re-crawled.

Incremental web crawler using chunks

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Eytan D Seidman