Patent ID: 11874882
Assignee: MICROSOFT TECHNOLOGY LICENSING, LLC
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G | IPC G

Claim 10:
11. A method performed by a computing system that executes a search engine, the method comprising:
receiving, at the search engine executing on the computing system, a query from a client computing device that is in network communication with the computing system;
returning a ranked list of webpages to the client computing device based upon the query, wherein the ranked list of webpages comprises a webpage that belongs to a website, and further wherein a position of the webpage in the ranked list of webpages is based upon a topical authority score assigned to the website with respect to a topic, the topical authority score is representative of an authoritativeness of the website with respect to the topic, wherein the topical authority score for the website is computed by way of acts comprising:
identifying key phrase candidates in webpages that belong to the website;
converting the identified key phrase candidates into feature vectors;
using a classifier that was trained on a set of key phrase pairs having labels indicating whether two key phrases are duplicates of one another, removing duplicate feature vectors to produce remaining feature vectors for remaining key phrase candidates; and
assigning scores to the remaining key phrase candidates based upon the remaining feature vectors, wherein a key phrase candidate in the remaining key phrase candidates is the topic, and further wherein the topical authority score assigned to the website is based upon a score in the scores assigned to the key phrase candidate.