APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR INDEXING ELECTRONIC CONTENT

摘要

Apparatus and methods are provided for indexing electronic content to be served to users' mobile and/or stationary communications and computing devices. An index is composed of multiple slices, with each slice storing multiple entries and each entry representing one content item or one campaign or collection of content items. An entry is populated with tokens representing attribute/value pairs of a target audience of the content item and/or property/value pairs of the item or the item's campaign. A query or request to identify content items for serving to a particular user is similarly formatted with tokens representing attribute/value pairs of the user and/or item/campaign. Queries can then be executed rapidly across any or all index entries in any or all slices. Within a slice, entries may be sorted by value or score, and integer components within an individual entry may be sorted to facilitate rapid comparison with a query.

主权项

1. A method of operating a content index, the method comprising:
indexing multiple content collections in a computer system memory, wherein each content collection is indexed by storing in the index a corresponding entry comprising:
one or more property tokens, each property token representing a property of the corresponding content collection; andone or more attribute tokens, each attribute token representing an attribute of a target audience of the corresponding content collection and a corresponding value of the attribute; maintaining the index by:
for each entry that receives multiple modifications after it is written and before it is re-written, collapsing the multiple modifications to a single modification that is applied to the entry when the entry is re-written; receiving a request for content to be served to a target user, the request comprising:
a set of properties of content collections from which content is to be selected to serve to the target user; anda set of attributes of the target user and corresponding values; searching the index for entries that match the request; and in response to the request for content, communicating identities of one or more content collections that satisfy the request.