Patent ID: 8312004

Claim:
A method performed by one or more computers of a ranking service, the method comprising: receiving information specifying one or more subscriber-specific parameters from a subscriber server, the subscriber server configured to provide data processing services that serve resources to client devices for presentation of the resources to users, the subscriber server configured to serve resources to client devices and capture user actions relating to the resources, the subscriber-specific parameters relating to the resources or the user actions; receiving, from the subscriber server and in accordance with a protocol, signals reporting the user actions, wherein: the protocol defines types of user actions that can be reported by the signals; the protocol defines a format for specifying values for one or more of a set of predefined parameters for qualifying the user actions, the predefined parameters having a priori significance to the ranking service, the predefined parameters being used by the ranking service for one or more other subscriber servers, each other subscriber server being configured to provide different data processing services that serve different resources to client devices; the protocol defines a format for specifying the one or more subscriber-specific parameters, the subscriber-specific parameters being used in addition to the predefined parameters, the subscriber-specific parameters being distinct from the predefined parameters, the subscriber-specific parameters being used by the ranking service only for the subscriber server; and the protocol defines a format for identifying resources to which the user actions are related using a namespace defined by the subscriber server; generating ranking data for the resources from the signals reporting the user actions; and providing the ranking data to the subscriber server to use in serving resources in an order based on the ranking data to client devices.