Customization of search results for search queries received from third party sites

摘要

A third party website provides a search interface to a general search engine. A site profile of the third party website describes various topics, keywords, or domains that are potentially relevant or of interest to users who access the third party website. The topics are associated with a topical directory, with domains associated with each topic; the domains in a given topic are given various weightings. When a search is submitted to the general search engine from the third party website via the search interface, the general search engine uses the site profile to customize the search results. The search results are customized by weighting the ranking of documents from websites associated with the topics in the site profile. The site profile can be manually or automatically constructed.

主权项

1. A computer-implemented method comprising:
receiving a request to perform a search, the request comprising a query received through a user interface provided by a third party website; determining a topic identifier for the third party website that provides the user interface through which the query is received; mapping the topic identifier for the third party website to one or more weight values, the one or more weight values being associated with a specific topic; retrieving a set of documents responsive to the query, each document in the set of documents having an information retrieval score; adjusting the information retrieval score of each of the documents that are associated with the specific topic by at least one of the one or more weight values associated with the specific topic; ranking the set of documents according to the respective information retrieval scores; and returning, in response to the request, search results data identifying at least a highest ranking portion of the set of documents and also identifying the rank order of the documents in the highest ranking portion.