Patent ID: 11947598
Assignee: MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 5:
6. A computer program embodied on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions such that when the computer program is executed on one or more computing devices, the one or more computing devices are arranged to carry out a method of generating search results relating to a search for people, the method comprising the one or more computing devices:
receiving from the user a search query, the search query relating to a search for people and including one or more search terms;
in response to receiving the search query, generating a search graph for the search for people related to the topic of interest to the user,
wherein the search graph is generated from a previously created graph,
wherein the previously created graph is a directional graph representing people and content shared between people,
the previously created graph comprising nodes and edges between the nodes, with people being represented by nodes of the graph and with content being represented by nodes of the graph, the direction of the edges of the graph indicating whether a person is a source or a destination of the corresponding content, and
wherein generating the search graph comprises:
filtering out nodes or edges of the previously created graph that represent content that is determined not to be relevant to the one or more search terms in the search query, and
for the remaining content that is determined to be relevant to the one or more search terms in the search query, adding to the graph a measure of the relevance of the content to the one or more search terms in the search query; and

identifying people in the search graph who are sources of content that is relevant, to the one or more search terms in the search query.