Google Nails First Web Search Patent

Google landed its first U.S. patent - for its method of determining Web page relevance related to search queries. The patent "governs methodology for parsing through Web documents to deliver... surfers the most relevant pages for their queries," CNET says - a hugely improved search engine that could affect companies building to rank Web pages, the tech news site suggests.

Google now fields about 150 million queries a day around the world, with keywords sent from Web servers to index servers, identifying pages that best match a user’s query. Google's new patent deals with finding the matches - it brings up initial documents related to the keyword and ranks each page with a relevancy score, then finds a local score value which influences the page's ranking.

The new technique was invented by Krishna Bharat, a Google senior research scientist.

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