Patent ID: 7716198

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving on a computing device resource items generated by a search engine in response to a search request; parsing each of the resource items to obtain data, wherein the data includes: text, formatting information and metadata; passing the data for each of the resource items that includes the text, the formatting information and the metadata through a feature extraction application for determining applicability of the obtained metadata by comparing the obtained metadata against known metadata for use in ranking search results; comparing words parsed from the text that is separate from the obtained metadata against a database of known words that have been previously characterized; using formatting characteristics of the data to determine when to extract a title from the resource item; wherein the formatting characteristics that are used include: a bold formatting characteristic; an underlining formatting characteristic; wherein the feature extraction application stores statistical information for each extracted title that provides a number of and a frequency of appearance of the extracted title in the data; and extracting features from the one or more portions for each of the resource items; passing extracted features through a ranking application for generating a ranking value for each of the resource items based on a relevance of each of the resource items to the search request; and generating a list of the resource items in an order according to the ranking value for each of the resource items, whereby when the resource item has the ranking value associated with being ranked as most relevant to the search request received by the search engine is displayed first.