Patent ID: 7716205

Claim:
A method for ranking Web pages, comprising: tracking actual Web surfer behavior at one or more computer systems of a distributed system through monitoring and counting of user selections of links on Web pages; storing counts of the user selections at nodes of the distributed system, said nodes defining a peer-to-peer network wherein a name space of uniform resource locators (URLs) for Web pages is divided among the nodes of the distributed system according to keys of a distributed hash table (DHT) and each respective count for a given one of the URLs is stored at a location determined by the DHT; and assigning a page rank (PR) to each of the Web pages according to each Web page's respective count, wherein the page ranks are determined according to a discrete probability distribution defined by the counts of the selections of the links as follows: PR ⁡ ( pg i ) = 1 - d N + d ⁢ ∑ j ⁢ ⁢ PR ⁡ ( pg j ) ⁢ P ij where pages pg j denote Web pages pointing to page pg j , N is a total number of Web pages, d is a damping factor, and probability p ij is a probability that a Web surfer will select a link to a page p j on the page p j .