Microsoft Search Patents first half 2010

Next up (first post was Yahoo patents) is the round up of search patents of interest from the folks at Microsoft. These, as you might imagine, take on new importance since we've likely seen the last of Yahoo as far as search is concerned. Now that we're down to only two engines of note, the Microsoft (aka Bing) stuff should garner more interest than in the past. Let the games begin!

Semantic and NLP

• Keyword usage score based on frequency impulse and frequency weight
• Fast on-line learning of transformed hidden Markov models
• Document summarization by maximizing informative content words
• System and method for context sensitive searching

Relevance signals

• Search by document type and relevance

Link related

• Search Engine Enhancement using mined implicit links
• Pseudo-anchor text extraction for vertical search
• Visualizing hyperlinks in a search result list

Behavioural Data

• Recommendation system that identifies a valuable user action by mining data supplied by a plurality of users to find a correlation that suggests one or more actions for notification
• Adapting search results to personal information needs
• Calculating web page importance based on web behaviour model
• Mining translations of web queries from web click-Through data
• Accounting for behavioral variability in web search

Query Analysis

• Searching questions based on topic and focus
• Predicting future queries from log data
• Relevant navigation with deep links into query
• Query comprehensions

Ranking methods

• Rank document based on a popularity of key meta-data
• UserRank: ranking linked nodes leveraging user logs
• Ranking results using multiple nested ranking
• Ranking search results using feature extraction
• System and method for incorporating anchor text into ranking search results
• Systems and methods for ranking documents based upon structurally interrelated information
• Ranking results based on query specific position bias
• Learning Latent Semantic Space for Ranking

Recommendation engine

• Keyword search volume seasonality forecasting engine

Systemic Elements

• Information Retrieval System
• System and method for facilitating full text searching utilizing inverted keyword indices
• System and method for generating normalized relevance measure for analysis of search results
• Indexing and searching of information including handler chaining
• System and method for customization of search results

Universal Search

• Projecting queries and images into a similarity space
• Query-by-image search and retrieval system
• Generating clusters of images for search results

Temporal

• Determination of time dependency of search queries
• Forecasting time-dependent search queries
• Real time popularity prediction for events and queries
• Strategies for identifying anomalies in time-series data
• History answering for re-finding search results

Web Spam

• System and method for Spam detection

Named Entities

• Named Entity transliteration using corporate corpra
• Entity-specific tuned searching

Geo Local

• System and method for providing a geographic search function

Other

• Clustering question search results based on topic and focus
• Search results injected into client applications
• Method and system for summarizing a document
• Automatically Showing More Search Results

And there we have it as far as the MS stuff is concerned. Next up we will put up the patent awards for the big dog, Google.

Past MS Patent Round Ups;

• Microsoft search patents 2008
• SEO Geeks Picks 09; Microsoft Search Patents
  
  

The entire first half of 2010 series;

• Yahoo Search Patents first half of 2010
• Microsoft Search Patents first half 2010
• Google Search Patents first half 2010