Method and apparatus for ranking web page search results

Abstract

A method and apparatus for ranking a plurality of pages identified during a search of a linked database includes forming a linear combination of two or more matrices, and using the coefficients of the eigenvector of the resulting matrix to rank the quality of the pages. The matrices includes information about the pages and are generally normalized, stochastic matrices. The linear combination can include attractor matrices that indicate desirable or “high quality” sites, and / or non-attractor matrices that indicate sites that are undesirable. Attractor matrices and non-attractor matrices can be used alone or in combination with each other in the linear combination. Additional bias toward high quality sites, or away from undesirable sites, can be further introduced with probability weighting matrices for attractor and non-attractor matrices. Other known matrices, such as a co-citation matrix or a bibliographic coupling matrix, can also be used in the present invention.

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0001] 1. Field of the Invention [0002] This invention relates generally to computerized information retrieval, and more particularly to identifying related pages in a hyperlinked database environment such as the World Wide Web. [0003] 2. Description of the Related Art [0004] It has become common for users of host computers connected to the World Wide Web (the “Web”) to employ Web browsers and search engines to locate Web pages having specific content of interest to users. A search engine, such as Digital Equipment Corporation's AltaVista search engine, indexes hundreds of millions of Web pages maintained by computers all over the world. The users of the hosts compose queries, and the search engine identifies pages that match the queries, e.g., pages that include key words of the queries. These pages are known as a “result set.” In many cases, particularly when a query is short or not well defined, the result set can be quite large, for example, thousands...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0011] The invention provides a method whereby a linear combination of matrices that provide information about the pages can be used to rank the pages. This allows results to be ranked based on two or more “page qualities” that are sought by the user, thus providing highly relevant results to the user.

Problems solved by technology

The pages in the result set may or may not satisfy the user's actual information needs.

The vast majority of users are not interested in retrieving the entire huge set of resources.

The challenge is to retrieve only the most relevant resources to the query.

However, this algorithm for finding related pages does not deal with popular URLs, with neighborhood graphs containing duplicate pages, or with cases where the computation is totally dominated by a single “hub” page.

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