Method ranking search results using biased click distance

• US 20070038622A1
• Filed: 08/15/2005
• Published: 02/15/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 08/15/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Meyerzon, Dmitriy, Zaragoza, Hugo
• Granted Patent: US 7,599,917 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99933 Query processing, i.e. searching
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99937 Sorting

Abstract

Methods of providing a document relevance score to a document on a network are disclosed. Computer readable medium having stored thereon computer-executable instructions for performing a method of providing a document relevance score to a document on a network are also disclosed. Further, computing systems containing at least one application module, wherein the at least one application module comprises application code for performing methods of providing a document relevance score to a document on a network are disclosed.

Claims

1. A computer readable medium having stored thereon computer-executable instructions for ranking documents on a network, said computer-executable instructions utilizing a ranking function that comprises one or more query-independent components, wherein at least one query-independent component includes a biased click distance parameter that takes into account a biased click distance value for each document on the network.

2. The computer readable medium of claim 1, wherein a biased click distance value is assigned to m authoritative documents on a network comprising N total documents with m being greater than or equal to 2 and less than N.

3. The computer readable medium of claim 2, wherein at least two of the assigned biased click distance values differ from one another.

4. The computer readable medium of claim 1, wherein the ranking function further comprises at least one query-independent component that includes an edge value parameter that takes into account edge values of each edge on the network, wherein one or more edge values are a number other than 1.

5. The computer readable medium of claim 4, wherein the edge values are equal to one another and equal a number other than 1.

6. The computer readable medium of claim 4, wherein the edge values are equal to one another and are equal to or greater than a highest biased click distance value initially assigned to one or more authoritative documents.

7. The computer readable medium of claim 4, wherein the at least one query-independent component includes both the biased click distance parameter and the edge value parameter.

8. The computer readable medium of claim 1, further comprising computer-executable instructions for assigning a score generated by the ranking function to each document on the network, said score being used to rank documents in ascending or descending order.

9. The computer readable medium of claim 7, wherein the score for each document is generated using a formula:

10. The computer readable medium of claim 1, further comprising computer-executable instructions for accepting a search inquiry inputted by a user, conducting a search of the documents on the network to generate search results comprising multiple documents, ranking the multiple documents of the search results using the ranking function to generate ranked search results, and displaying the ranked search results to the user.

11. A computing system containing at least one application module usable on the computing system, wherein the at least one application module comprises application code loaded thereon from the computer readable medium of claim 1.

12. A method of determining a document relevance score for a document on a network, said method comprising the steps of:

storing document and link information for documents on a network;

generating a representation of the network from the document and link information, wherein the representation of the network includes nodes that represent the documents and edges that represent the links;

assigning a biased click distance value to at least two nodes on the network, wherein the nodes that are assigned a biased click distance value are authoritative nodes;

computing a click distance for each of the non-authoritative nodes in the representation of the network, wherein the click distance for a given non-authoritative node is measured from the given non-authoritative node to an authoritative node closest to the given non-authoritative node, said computing step resulting in a biased click distance value for each document; and

using the biased click distance value for each document to determine the document relevance score of a given document on the network.

13. The method of claim 12, wherein at least two authoritative nodes have assigned biased click distance values that differ from one another.

14. The method of claim 12, further comprising the step of:

assigning to each edge in the representation an edge value, wherein the edge values are equal to or greater than 1.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein each edge value is greater than a highest biased click distance value assigned to any of the authoritative nodes.

16. The method of claim 12, wherein the document relevance score for each document on the network is generated using a formula:

17. A method of ranking documents on a network, said method comprising the steps of:

determining a document relevance score for each document on the network using the method of claim 12;

and

ranking the documents in descending order based on the document relevance scores of each document.

18. A method of ranking search results of a search query, said method comprising the steps of:

determining a document relevance score for each document in the search results of a search query using the method of claim 12;

and

ranking the documents in descending order based on the document relevance scores of each document.

19. A computer readable medium having stored thereon computer-executable instructions for performing the method of claim 12.

20. A computing system containing at least one application module usable on the computing system, wherein the at least one application module comprises application code for performing a method of determining a document relevance score for a document on a network, said method comprising the steps of:

assigning a biased click distance value to at least two nodes on a representation of the network, wherein the nodes that are assigned a biased click distance value are authoritative nodes;

computing a click distance for each non-authoritative node in the representation of the network, wherein the click distance for a given non-authoritative node is measured from the given non-authoritative node to an authoritative node closest to the given non-authoritative node, said computing step resulting in a biased click distance value for each document; and

using the biased click distance value for each document to determine the document relevance score of a given document on the network.