Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Neil Sharman

Jay Goyal

Vibhaakar Sharma

Utkarsh Jain

Vinay Deshpande

Daniel Yuan

Gaurav Sareen

Hugh Evan Williams

Gopi Prashanth Gopal

Sanaz Ahari

Nitin Agrawal

Milad Shokouhi

Derrick Leslie Connell

Andrew Peter Oakley

Yinzhe Yu

Christopher A Meyers

Nicholas Craswell

Oren Firestein

Methods and systems for quickly serving documents are provided. Documents may be served to users, for example, in response to search query inputs. Documents may be individually communicated to a document server prior to batching the documents. By individually communicating documents to document servers, the document experiences sub-second latency before it is available to a user. The documents may also be modified individually such that real-time serving is not interrupted.

Receiving individual documents to serve

Methods and systems for serving documents are provided. Documents may be served to users, for example, in response to search query inputs. Documents may be individually received for serving to users. In order to serve documents, documents are typically indexed. To serve documents in a real-time environment, a data structure is configured to index documents that are received while simultaneously being queried for documents to serve to a user. Documents that have not yet completed the indexing process are not available for serving and, thus, are not queried. Additionally, the data structure includes a memory optimizer such that indexing does not waste memory of the data structure.

Lock-free indexing of documents

Methods and systems for quickly serving documents are provided. Documents may be served to users, for example, in response to search query inputs. Documents may be individually communicated to a document server individually prior to batching the documents. In such a real-time serving system, serving components may fail. To ensure real-time serving despite the failure, spares are utilized to replace the failing serving components such that the spare can immediately begin receiving documents. The spare can also be synchronized with other serving components to obtain the memory of the failing serving component prior to the failure.

Recovery of a document serving environment

Methods, systems, and media are provided for an optimized search engine index. The optimized index is formed by merging small lower level indexes of fresh documents together into a hierarchical cluster of multiple higher level indexes. The optimized index of fresh documents is formed via a single threaded process, while a fresh index serving platform concurrently serves fresh queries. The hierarchy of higher level indexes is formed by merging lower and/or higher level indexes with similar expiration times together. Therefore, as some indexes expire, the remaining un-expired indexes can be re-used and merged with new incoming indexes. The single threaded process provides fast serving of fresh documents, while also providing time to integrate the fresh indexes into a long term primary search engine index, prior to expiring.

Hierarchical merging for optimized index

Methods, systems, and media are provided for identifying and clustering queries that are rising in popularity. Resultant clustered queries can be compared to other stored queries using textual and temporal correlations. Fresh indices containing information and results from recently crawled content sources are searched to obtain the most recent query activity. Historical indices are also searched to obtain temporally correlated information and results that match the clustered query stream. A weighted average acceleration of a spike can be calculated to distinguish between a legitimate spike and a non-legitimate spike. Legitimate clusters are combined with other stored clusters and presented as grouped content results to a user output device.

Detecting spiking queries

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Sammamish, WA, United States of America

Neil Sharman