Method for node ranking in a linked database

• US 7,058,628 B1
• Filed: 07/02/2001
• Issued: 06/06/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 01/10/1997
• Status: Expired due to Term

• Current Assignee: Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford Management Co.)
• Inventors: Page, Lawrence
• Primary Examiner(s): LE, UYEN T
• Application Number:
  US09/895,174
• Time in Patent Office: 1,800 Days
• Field of Search: 707 1- 3, 707/100, 707/104.1, 715/501.1
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/382 using citations hypermedia G06F16/94
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99935 Query augmenting and refining, e.g. inexact access
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99937 Sorting

Abstract

A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database. The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it. In addition, the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document. The method is particularly useful in enhancing the performance of search engine results for hypermedia databases, such as the world wide web, whose documents have a large variation in quality.

Claims

1. A computer implemented method of scoring a plurality of linked documents, comprising:

identifying a plurality of documents, at least some of the documents being linked documents, at least some of the documents being linking documents, and at least some of the documents being both linked documents and linking documents, each of the linked documents being pointed to by a link in one or more of the linking documents;

assigning a score to each of the linked documents based on scores associated with the one or more linking documents; and

processing the linked documents according to the assigned scores.

2. A computer implemented method of scoring a plurality of documents, comprising:

identifying a plurality of linked documents;

identifying linking documents that link to the linked documents;

determining a score for each of the linked documents based on scores of the linking documents that link to the linked document; and

processing the linked document according to the determined scores.