Methods and apparatuses for searching content

摘要

Embodiments of methods and apparatuses for searching contents, including structured search for atomic search expressions, including proximately associated atomic search expressions, are described herein. Embodiments may use tree structures (or more generally, graph structures), layout structures, and/or other information to capture within search results relevant content, include sub-document constituents, to reduce the incidence of false positives within search results, and/or to improve the accuracy of rankings within search results. Embodiments may use distance and/or scoring functions to generate scores for the structures to indicate relevance, including usage of local geometry, and linear iteration over portions of the content at a level to capture potential of a portion to influence other portions of the level, and influence received by a portion from the other portions of the level. Other embodiments may be described and claimed.

主权项

1. A computer implemented method comprising:
receiving by a search engine, operating on a computing device, from a content searching or consuming application, an atomic search term, the search engine and the content searching or consuming application being operated on one or more different or same computing devices; receiving content nominally associated with the atomic search term, or access information of the content, by the search engine; generating, by the search engine, one or more scores for one or more structures of the content indicative of relative relevance of the content or one or more portions of the content to the atomic search term, wherein the generating of a score for a structure is based at least in part on a distance function and a scoring function, wherein the structure has sub-structures structurally describing at least a portion of the content, and having content nodes and/or text strings, wherein the sub-structures are hierarchically organized with the one or more portions of the content in a sub-structure at a level respectively assigned one or more positions according to a geometry established for that level, wherein the distance function measures distances between sub-structures within the structure, and the scoring function is positionally sensitive, yielding different scores for different occurrence positions of the atomic search term in the sub-structures; and conditionally providing or not providing the content or one or more portions of the content, or access information of the content or one or more portions of the content, to the content searching or consuming application, by the search engine, based at least in part on the generated one or more scores; wherein the generating of a score for a structure further includes at each level, linearly iterating over one or more portions of the content at the level to capture potential of a portion to influence other portions of the level, and influence received by a portion from the other portions of the level.