{"id":170672,"date":"2011-03-07T19:19:42","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T19:19:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/entity-search-and-query-portals\/"},"modified":"2017-06-08T16:59:10","modified_gmt":"2017-06-08T23:59:10","slug":"entity-search-and-query-portals","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/entity-search-and-query-portals\/","title":{"rendered":"Entity Search and Query Portals"},"content":{"rendered":"

The goal of entity search is to return entities (e.g., people, products, locations) relevant to a keyword query. The goal of Query Portals is to go one step further and return not only the names of relevant entities but a rich set of information associated with each entity.<\/p>\n

Often, users issuing keyword searches are not looking for documents but for entities\u00a0residing in a\u00a0structured database. Consider a user searching for products (product search), people (expert search\/celebrity search), businesses (local search) or locations (travel search). In early 2005, we\u00a0proposed this problem\u00a0and called it “object search<\/a><\/strong>“;\u00a0<\/strong>(we were one of first groups to\u00a0introduce this problem). This problem\u00a0is now popularly know as “entity search” (it has started to appear as a separate track in conferences like SIGIR and WWW).\u00a0The result of our early work appeared in 2006 SIGMOD conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Subsequently, we\u00a0explored ways in supporting entity search functionality\u00a0in a\u00a0general web search engine. We proposed ways to integrate the functionality tightly into a web search engine. This work appeared in WWW 2009 conference<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We\u00a0then developed the “Query Portals<\/strong>” system that returns not only the entity names\u00a0but also a rich amount of information for each returned entity.\u00a0 Some of this information is mined from query logs.\u00a0The paper on the “Query Portals” system appeared in the Developer’s track of WWW 2009 conference<\/a>.\u00a0We also demonstrated it in SIGMOD 2010 conference<\/a>. Here is a screenshot from the 2009 system:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n

Note that although “entity information cards” or “entity panes” have become very common in today’s web search engines, this was not the case in 2006-2008 when we built the Query Portals system. Although the code did not ship in Bing, we believe that the system was one of the pioneers of this feature and it\u00a0did\u00a0have a significant impact on search engines.<\/p>\n

Past contributors: Venky Ganti, Dong Xin, Sanjay Agrawal<\/p>\n

Past interns: Dong Xin, Zhijun Yin, Rares Vernica<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The goal of entity search is to return entities (e.g., people, products, locations) relevant to a keyword query. The goal of Query Portals is to go one step further and return not only the names of relevant entities but a rich set of information associated with each entity. Often, users issuing keyword searches are not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[13563,13555],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-170672","msr-project","type-msr-project","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-research-area-search-information-retrieval","msr-locale-en_us","msr-archive-status-active"],"msr_project_start":"2011-03-20","related-publications":[155363,156790,157323,158949],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-groups":[],"related-events":[],"related-opportunities":[],"related-posts":[],"related-articles":[],"tab-content":[],"slides":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"chrisko","display_name":"Arnd Christian K\u00f6nig","author_link":"Arnd Christian K\u00f6nig<\/a>","is_active":false,"user_id":31427,"last_first":"K\u00f6nig, Arnd Christian","people_section":0,"alias":"chrisko"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"kaushik","display_name":"Kaushik Chakrabarti","author_link":"Kaushik Chakrabarti<\/a>","is_active":false,"user_id":32503,"last_first":"Chakrabarti, Kaushik","people_section":0,"alias":"kaushik"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"surajitc","display_name":"Surajit Chaudhuri","author_link":"Surajit Chaudhuri<\/a>","is_active":false,"user_id":33764,"last_first":"Chaudhuri, Surajit","people_section":0,"alias":"surajitc"}],"msr_research_lab":[199565],"msr_impact_theme":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/170672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-project"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/170672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358133,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/170672\/revisions\/358133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=170672"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=170672"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=170672"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=170672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}