Yahoo! Inc.

Ryan Edmund Sue

Alan Wada

Xuejun Wang

Robert Marshall

Kenneth Yung

Hongbin Qi

Kaushal Kurapat

Mike Guangyu Cao

A method and apparatus is provided for hosting within a search engine, large-scale heterogeneous repositories of searchable and navigable content. Customers of the hosting platform are customers wanting to outsource the management of their searchable content. Content domain experts from each customer independently define a taxonomy of categories and attributes for their structured content that form a hierarchical set of nodes (a directed graph) that are mapped to a common physical search engine infrastructure. The mapping algorithm that maps unique attributes across potentially very different subject domains onto the same physical infrastructure is introduced. Once the physical structure is created, the search engine can use it for searching or navigating just within one customer's domain or users can search across multiple customer domains. When a customer makes changes to the logical structure, each individual change is categorized as compatible and incompatible, and executed in different time frames based on the amount of disruption it will require to the operational system.

Performing large scale structured search allowing partial schema changes without system downtime

A plurality of documents are ranked. The documents are returned as the result of a query computed for each search engine of a plurality of search engines. Each document of the plurality of documents is associated with a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The plurality of documents includes at least one document returned as a result of the query from each of the search engines. For each URL associated with a document from the plurality of documents, a frequency of the URLs is determined. Ranking the plurality of documents includes ranking them based on one or more factors, which are based on the frequency determined for each URL associated with the plurality of documents.

Ranking documents

A plurality of search engines is selected from multiple search engines based on a search query and one or more criteria. To obtain search results for the search query, one or more search queries are submitted to the plurality of search engines. For each search engine of the plurality of search engines, certain search results are received for the one or more search queries submitted to each search engine. Consolidated search results are generated with consolidation of the certain search results that are received from each search engine of the plurality of search engines.

Federated searches implemented across multiple search engines

Growing community of inventors

Fremont, CA, United States of America

Ryan Edmund Sue