International Business Machines Corporation

Google Inc.

Nadav Eiron

Soham Mazumdar

Anna Lynn Patterson

Yonatan Zunger

Pei Cao

Russell Power

Ronny Lempel

Andrei Zary Broder

Eugene Jon Shekita

John A McPherson, Jr

Michael Herscovici

Ning Li

Marcus Felipe Fontoura

Kevin Snow McCurley

Andreas Neumann

John Anthony Tomlin

Runping Qi

Shila Ofek-Koifman

Felipe Marcus Fontoura

Andrew Stephen Tomkins

Daniel Norin Meredith

Jan Hendrik Pieper

Joerg Meyer

Marcus Fontoura

John McPherson, Jr

Eugene Shekita

An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are extracted from the document collection. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases, using phrase posting lists. The phrase posting lists are stored in an cluster of index servers. The phrase posting lists can be tiered into groups, and sharded into partitions. Phrases in a query are identified based on possible phrasifications. A query schedule based on the phrases is created from the phrases, and then optimized to reduce query processing and communication costs. The execution of the query schedule is managed to further reduce or eliminate query processing operations at various ones of the index servers.

Index server architecture using tiered and sharded phrase posting lists

A system and method of indexing a plurality of entities located in a taxonomy, the entities comprising sets of terms, comprises receiving terms in an index structure; building a posting list for an entity with respect to the locations of the set of terms defining the entity and data associated with the respective terms; and indexing a name of a group comprising the entities within this group at the location of the entities with the data of the group comprising the name of the respective entity at each location. The building of the posting list comprises storing the location of the term and data associated with the term in an entry in the posting list for the term. The method comprises indexing aliases of the name of the group comprising the term, and using an inverted list index to associate data with each occurrence of an index term.

Method and framework to support indexing and searching taxonomies in large scale full text indexes

A method is carried out by storing information describing configurations of discussion threads formed of respective series of EMTs that are exchanged among at least two individuals. The discussion threads have a root EMT, zero or more reply EMTs, and a last offspring EMT. The method is further carried out by compacting the EMT discussion threads, and indexing the compacted EMT discussion threads.

Indexing and searching of electronic message transmission thread sets

A method includes describing the thread configurations of a volume of well-ordered electronic message transmissions (EMT) and utilizing the thread configuration data to conduct selective searches of the EMT volume. An apparatus includes a thread processor and a query manager. The thread processor analyzes the EMT threads and records the thread configuration data. The query manager utilizes the thread configuration data to conduct selective searches of the EMT volume.

A method and system for querying multifaceted information. An inverted index is constructed to include unique indexed tokens associated with posting lists of one or more documents. An indexed token is either a facet token included in a document as an annotation or a path prefix of the facet token. The annotation indicates a path within a tree structure representing a facet that includes the document. The tree structure includes nodes representing categories of documents. A query is received that includes constraints on documents. The constraints are associated with indexed tokens and corresponding posting lists. An execution of the query includes identifying the corresponding posting lists by utilizing the constraints and the inverted index and intersecting the posting lists to obtain a query result.

Efficient multifaceted search in information retrieval systems

A method for querying multifaceted information. An inverted index is constructed to include unique indexed tokens associated with posting lists of one or more documents. An indexed token is either a facet token included in a document as an annotation or a path prefix of the facet token. The annotation indicates a path within a tree structure representing a facet that includes the document. The tree structure includes nodes representing categories of documents. Constructing the inverted index includes generating a full path token and an associated full path token posting list. A query is received that includes constraints on documents. The constraints are associated with indexed tokens and corresponding posting lists. An execution of the query includes identifying the corresponding posting lists by utilizing the constraints and the inverted index and intersecting the posting lists to obtain a query result.

A logical directory ranking system ranks documents or web pages utilizing logical directories. The present system groups together compound documents as a single information node with one or more leaves, constructing a logical directory graph. URLs can be grouped at a level of granularity below an individual directory. For example, the URLs may be grouped together on the basis of hostname, domain, or any level of the hierarchy of the URLs. Edges in the logical directory graph are formed by links between the logical directories. Edges have weights corresponding to the number of links between logical directories. Nodes have weights corresponding to the number of web pages or leaves represented by a node. A ranking level is determined for each node as a function of the node weight and the edge weight. The ranking level is then applied to each URL that the node represents.

System and method and computer program product for ranking logical directories

A dangling web page processing system ranks dangling web pages on the web. The system ranks dangling web pages of high quality that cannot be crawled by a crawler. In addition, the system adjusts ranks to penalize dangling web pages that return errors when links on the dangling web pages are crawled. By providing a rank for dangling web pages, the present system allows the concentration of crawling resources on those dangling web pages that have the highest rank in the uncrawled region. The system operates locally to the dangling web pages, providing efficient determination of ranks for the dangling web pages. The system explicitly discriminates against web pages on the basis of whether they point to penalty pages, i.e., pages that return an error when a link is followed. By incorporating more fine-grained information such as this into ranking, the system can improve the quality of individual search results and better manage resources for crawling.

System and method for ranking nodes in a network

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Nadav Eiron