Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Vinay Deshpande

Jay Goyal

Utkarsh Jain

Neil Sharman

Vibhaakar Sharma

Daniel Yuan

Yinzhe Yu

Lin Guo

Junaid Ahmed

Gaurav Sareen

Abhishek Kumar Singh

Walter Sun

Jingfeng Li

Oren Firestein

Thomas Arthur Ledbetter

Brahm Kiran Singh

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, systems, and computer-storage media for improving the freshness, or the apparent freshness, of search results are described. In an embodiment, the first portion of search results presented on a search results page are based on responsiveness to the search query and a second portion of results describe only recently published documents that are responsive to the search query. In an embodiment, a more recent version of the document, which is not directly used to determine responsiveness, is used to build the caption for a search result. Another way to make search results appear fresh is to include a publication time within the search result caption. In one embodiment, the publication time is generated by calculating a point in time between when a document is first added to a search index and the previous time the search engine visited the site where the document was found.

Enhancing freshness of search results

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

Growing community of inventors

Bellevue, WA, United States of America

Vinay Deshpande