The Microsoft adCenter Code Blog

Microsoft just unveiled a patent application that may be the inspiration for Windows Live QnA, the patent describes a process for removing unlinked documents from a search engine’s index along with an approach for presenting relevant snippets with search results, a means of using cached search results for queries with relevant advertising results, and a query refinement process based upon past user behavior.

With the success enjoyed by Yahoo Answers and similar services it is no surprise that Microsoft has developed this service.

I would surmise that as Microsoft is clearly leading the way with demographic targeting options that QnA will become yet another source of demographic targeting information. While Microsoft seems to get to most of the niches in search marketing later then Google and Yahoo it does seem that they have the best understanding of the value these services represent when the information gathered with them is made available for specific targeting by advertisors.

Here is the abstract from the patent,

“Documents are intelligently deleted from an index of crawled documents based on link and parent node information recorded from the crawl. A document visited during a first crawl may not be navigated to during a second crawl because of an error and the present invention verifies whether the document has been deleted. The present invention also prevents the document from being deleted when it is referenced by another document, indicating that the document is still a valid document.”

Jack