Microsoft Search Related Patents

System and method for blending the results of a classifier and a search engine:

A method to produce a list of documents retrieved from a search engine, ranked according to their relevance to search terms, includes interleaving the lists resulting from two searches. The first search is one that occurs over documents where the list is ranked using a first probabilistic ranking algorithm. The second list is a list of documents obtained by searching over a query log of prior searches using the same search terms. The second list is ranked according to a second probabilistic algorithm. Interleaving of the two lists includes eliminating duplicate occurrences of documents and appending the remaining documents to the end of the interleaved list if the two lists of individual search results differ in length. The interleaved list may then be presented to a user for review.

Personalization of web page search rankings:

Methods and systems are provided for efficiently computing personalized rankings of web pages or other interconnected objects. The personalized rankings are produced by efficiently computing an approximation matrix to an ideal personalized page ranking matrix. The methods and systems provided herein can be used to produce search results with particular relevance to an individual searcher.