nealrodriguez - 8:13 pm on May 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

this is definitely one of my favorite patents - for one, it was easy for me to understand; it appears google had planned on ranking results based on what people were bookmarking online before filing this thing in '03.

The search engine may utilize ratings or annotations associated with the previously identified uniform resource locator to locate and sort results.

Methods and systems for personalized network searching [patft.uspto.gov]

social g also included that the algo would rank documents based on peripheral variables associated with bookmarks:

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises a plurality of bookmarks. 9. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises an annotation. 10. The method of claim 1, wherein the personalized search object comprises a rating.

ratings that could include upvotes you see next to result snippets; diggs; stumbles; comments; reviews...

they even allowed for a feature to identify people in your network;

An embodiment of the present invention may comprise features to facilitate community building. For example, in one embodiment, the uniform resource locator comprises a community bookmark. The bookmark may be shared by a set of users or may be transmitted by one user and received by another. The second user can then perform personalized queries that are based, at least in part, on the shared bookmark. In another embodiment, a cluster of users is identified based at least in part on the bookmarks and annotations that they have previously identified.

more specifically, i am thinking about crawling social media profiles and links shared on those profiles, to which you link on your google profiles, maybe even gmail and gchat; and of course sites you join on google friend connect; and what you share through google and google reader. and once they identify your twitter hyperlinked idiosyncrosies, they could then discover those of your followers and rank documents based on what everyone loves... or loves to spam ;)

and ultimately distinguishing what one and one's followers and friends truly love and love to spam, is the feature measuring your 'linger time:'

For example, in one embodiment, the implicit measure comprises the linger time. In other words, if a user spends a great deal of time on a site, it is identified as a bookmark for later personalized searches. In other embodiments, the implicit measure may comprise at least one of the quantity of repeat visits to the site or the quantity of click-throughs on the site. In one embodiment, temporal decay of ratings may be utilized so that unused or rarely used bookmarks, whether explicitly marked or implicitly marked, become unmarked over time. Other implicit measures include printing the page, saving the page, and the amount of scrolling performed on the page.

this eliminates ranking 'personalized search objects' that show a lot of support based on reciprocal voting and rings, which vote and close; so keep those pages open for a few hours to show your support!

i never knew tinyurl was out in '03

Record created on 27-Jan-2002

[edited by: rogerd at 3:20 pm (utc) on May 14, 2009]