Yahoo! Inc.

International Business Machines Corporation

Verity, Inc.

Excalibur Ip, LLC

Slack Technologies, Inc.

Jianchang Mao

Zhichen Xu

Chung-Man Tam

Kenneth Norton

Qi Lu

Eckart Walther

Ashley Woodman Hall

David Ku

Adrienne Bassett

Nathan Arnold

Daniel Eric Rose

Ali Diab

Kevin Lee

Prabhakar Raghavan

Matthias Zimmerman

Rajat Mukherjee

Farzin Maghoul

Chad P Walters

Jian Yang

Alpha Kamchiu Luk

Yun Fu

Abe Taha

Kottappuram Mohamedali Mohiuddin

Sumit Taank

Christina Yip Chung

Pavel Berkhim

Myron Dale Flickner

John JianShi Wang

Byron Edward Dom

Jayavel Shanmugasundaram

Erik Nathan Vee

Pavel Berkhin

John Anthony Tomlin

Sergei Vassilvitskii

Tasos Anastasakos

Tetsunosuke Fujisaki

Ruofei Zhang

Carlton Wayne Niblack

Raymond Amand Lorie

Daniel C Fain

Dmitry Pavlov

Ashok K Chandra

Jinhui Liu

Michel A Tourn

Neil Latarche

D Christopher Dryer

Jacob Sisk

Heidi Eldenburg Bramlet

Charity A Rieck

Difu Su

Albert Meltzer

Vamsi Vutukuru

Mani Abrol

Panayiotis Tsaparas

Oliver Kennedy

Computer systems and methods incorporate user annotations (metadata) regarding various pages or sites, including annotations by a querying user and by members of a trust network defined for the querying user into search and browsing of a corpus such as the World Wide Web. A trust network is defined for each user, and annotations by any member of a first user's trust network are made visible to the first user during search and/or browsing of the corpus. Users can also limit searches to content annotated by members of their trust networks or by members of a community selected by the user.

Search system and methods with integration of user annotations from a trust network

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

The present invention relates to systems, methods, and user interfaces for browsing a collection of content items saved by a user or by one or more buddies associated with a given user. The method of the present invention comprises saving one or more content items and one or more associated keywords as specified by a user. An interface is generated that displays the one or more saved content items and the one or more associated keywords, as well as the one or more buddies associated with a given user. A user indication of the selection of a given keyword or the selection of a given buddy by the user is received. The one or more displayed content items are filtered according to the selected keyword, buddy, or combination of selected keyword and buddy.

User interface for navigating a keyword space

An advertisement impression distribution system is programmed to generate an allocation plan for serving a number of advertisement impressions changeable as a result of one or more events, the allocation plan to allocate a first portion of advertisement impressions to satisfy guaranteed demand and a second portion of advertisement impressions to satisfy non-guaranteed demand. The system includes an optimizer programmed to establish a relationship between the first portion of advertisement impressions and the second portion of advertisement impressions, the relationship defining a range of possible proportions of allocation of the first portion of advertisement impressions and the second portion of advertisement impressions; and to impose at least one objective on the relationship including moderating an increase in the number of advertisement impressions available for allocation to the first and second portions, to minimize a cost associated with reducing a quality of the advertisement impressions as their volume increases. The system outputs the allocation plan to an ad serving module to control serving of the advertisement impressions according to the range of possible proportions of allocation between the first and the second portions.

Inventory allocation for advertising with changeable supply landscape

An advertisement impression distribution system includes a data processing system operable to generate an allocation plan for serving advertisement impressions. The allocation plan allocates a first portion of advertisement impressions to satisfy guaranteed demand and a second portion of advertisement impressions to satisfy nonguaranteed demand. The data processing system includes an optimizer configured to establish a relationship between the first portion of advertisement impressions and the second portion of advertisement impressions. The relationship defines a range of proportions of allocation of the first portion and the second portion. The optimizer generates a solution maximizing guaranteed demand fairness, non-guaranteed demand revenue, and click value. The solution identifies a determined proportion of the first portion of advertisement impressions to serve and a determined proportion of the second portion of advertisement impressions to serve. The data processing system outputs the allocation plan to control serving of the advertisement impressions.

System for display advertising optimization using click or conversion performance

Disclosed are apparatus and methods for facilitating the ranking of web objects. The method includes automatically adjusting a plurality of weight values for a plurality of parameters for inputting into a ranking engine that is adapted to rank a plurality of web objects based on such weight values and their corresponding parameters. The adjusted weight values are provided to the ranking engine so as to generate a ranked set of web objects based on such adjusted weight values and their corresponding parameters, as well as a particular query. A relevance metric (e.g., that quantifies or qualifies how relevant the generated ranked set of web objects are for the particular query) is determined. The method includes automatically repeating the operations of adjusting the weight values, providing the adjusted weight values to the ranking engine, and determining a relevance metric until the relevance metric reaches an optimized level, which corresponds to an optimized set of weight values. The repeated operations utilize one or more sets of weight values including at least one set that results in a worst relevance metric value, as compared to a previous set of weight values, according to a certain probability in order to escape local optimal solution to reach the global optimal solution.

Optimization framework for tuning ranking engine

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 for sharing content with a user includes receiving from a user a first set of keywords for annotating an annotated user; receiving from the user a second set of keywords that designate whether annotated content annotated by at least one keyword included in the second set of keywords may be shared with the annotated user; storing in a data store a first association of the first set of keywords with the annotated user, and a second association of the second set of keywords with the annotated user; receiving a keyword selection for a select keyword and an identifier for the annotated user; and displaying on the client system content annotated by the select keyword if the annotated user is annotated by at least one keyword in the first set of keywords, and if the select keyword is included in the second set of keywords.

Apparatus and method for controlling content access based on shared annotations for annotated users in a folksonomy scheme

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Jianchang Mao