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Search ranking estimation

  • US 8,473,477 B1
  • Filed: 08/05/2011
  • Issued: 06/25/2013
  • Est. Priority Date: 10/06/2004
  • Status: Expired due to Fees
First Claim
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1. In a computerized search system in which queries are submitted by users who receive, in response, a list of documents selected from a corpus of documents wherein the list comprises documents deemed responsive to a user'"'"'s query, a method of determining relevance of the documents comprising:

  • obtaining the query from the user;

    determining a distribution of nodes of a taxonomy that have non zero probabilities of containing documents relevant to the query;

    determining a probability that a document matching the query resides in a particular node;

    determining a relevance of documents to the query by multiplying a particular node probability from the distribution of nodes by the probability that a document matching the query resides in the particular node;

    for each particular node containing a particular document, determining a value of the relevance of the particular document to the query by multiplying a determined relevance of the particular document matching the query by the initial probability that the particular node includes relevant documents;

    generating updated probabilities that the distribution of nodes of the taxonomy contain relevant documents by multiplying individual ones of the relevance of documents to the query by a weighting factor, wherein the weighting factors used to generate the updated probabilities decay monotonically with the relevance value of the documents to the query;

    generating an updated distribution of nodes by weighting each of the relevance of documents to the query;

    determining an updated relevance of documents to the query based on the updated distribution of nodes, updated probabilities, and the relevance of documents matching the query; and

    summing the updated relevance values to determine the relevance of the documents to the query.

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