Page-ranking method and system

• US 20070219993A1
• Filed: 03/17/2006
• Published: 09/20/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 03/17/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: X Corp. (f/k/a Twitter, Inc.) (X Holdings Corp.)
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Lenchner, Jonathan, Milch, Daniel, Laker, Meir
• Granted Patent: US 7,676,464 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 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access

Abstract

A page-ranking method includes mining a portion of content of a user workstation which is connectable to a network to detect references to pages of the network. The pages may be ranked based on the detected references.

Claims

1. A page-ranking method, comprising:

mining a portion of content of a user workstation which is connectable to a network to detect references to pages of said network.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

ranking said pages based on said detected references.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said portion of content of said user workstation comprises a file that is textually minable and is one of residing on and attached to a user workstation.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said network comprises an intranet, and mining said portion of said user workstation is performed as part of a back-up process for said intranet.

5. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

designating another portion of content of said user workstation that is not accessible for mining to detect page references.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein said user workstation comprises a plurality of user workstations.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein said mining comprises using e-mail scanning code which is included as part of a code for handling e-mail.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein said mining comprises using at least one of scanning code and crawling code to detect said references.

9. The method of claim 2, wherein said user workstation comprises a plurality of user workstations, and

wherein said ranking said pages comprises assigning a weight to a user workstation in said plurality of user workstations based on said references detected in said portion of content of said user workstation.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein said assigning said weight comprises weighting a user workstation based on a time at which high quality pages are stored on said user workstation.

11. The method of claim 2, wherein said ranking said pages comprises developing a set of information categories which are relevant to said network.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

assigning a content relevance rank to a page in said categories, which indicates how relevant said page is to said categories.

13. The method of claim 12, further comprising:

assigning an expertise rank to a person in said categories, which indicates a level of expertise for said person with respect to said categories.

14. The method of claim 13, further comprising:

computing a value rank for a page in said categories, which indicates a level of value for said page with respect to said categories.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein said computing said value rank comprises:

when a reference to a page is detected in said portion of said content of a user workstation of a person, adjusting said value rank of said page in a category based on the relevance rank of the page and the expertise rank of the person with respect to that category;

when a reference to a page is detected in an e-mail, adjusting said value rank of said page based on the expertise rank of a sender and a recipient of said page, and the relevance rank of the page; and

when a reference to a page is detected in a message passed through an instant messaging facility, adjusting said value rank of said page based on the expertise rank of a sender and a recipient of said message, and the relevance rank of the page.

19. A programmable storage medium tangibly embodying a program of machine-readable instructions executable by a digital processing apparatus to perform the page-ranking method of claim 1.

20. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

deploying computing infrastructure in which computer-readable code is integrated into a computing system, such that said code and said computing system combine to perform said method.

16. A page-ranking system for an intranet, comprising:

a mining module for mining a portion of content of a user workstation which is connectable to said network to detect references to pages of said network.

17. The system of claim 16, further comprising:

a ranking module for ranking said pages based on said detected references.

18. A network search method, comprising:

entering a search query;

ranking pages of said network by mining a portion of content of a user workstation which is connectable to said network to detect references to said pages; and

returning a list of pages relevant to said search query based on a result of said ranking said pages.