The end result is to drastically reduce the ability of site owners to influence their rankings, while empowering the user base to automatically organize and rank Internet documents and ecommerce product pages. The Internet is growing and changing at an exponential rate. Conventional search technologies easily uncover a large amount of information but are incapable of providing relevant results. Worse, these technologies effectively empower web site authors to wrongfully influence their site rankings. Variations of the conventional search technologies that factor in link popularity are still subject to wrongful author influence and fail to properly rank sites that have few referring links, such as new web sites or ecommerce product pages.
Editorial staffs are extremely expensive and usually require several months to review new listings.
The expense and delays associated with editorial indexes are especially problematic for ecommerce listings where huge volumes of product pages are often introduced and changed. The Direct Hit Popularity Engine dramatically reduces these and other problems by empowering users to automatically determine the relevancy ranking of Internet web sites, news articles or product pages. Using conventional search technologies, open site submissions and other data inputs to gather data, the Direct Hit system organizes information according to the number of clickthroughs, the amount of time spent at the site and a number of other factors. The Direct Hit technology effectively harnesses the activity of millions of daily Internet searchers to automatically organize information and provide highly relevant search results. Ask Jeeves, Inc.