Patent ID: 7356530

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of ranking the relevancy of pages in a collection of pages including linking hypertext pages, comprising: crawling the World Wide Web to produce a collection of pages without limitation to topic; for each page in the collection of pages, examining a probability of visitors viewing a particular page to determine a page weight for said particular page; for each of a plurality of selected words, with regard to each of a plurality of selected pages in the collection of pages, determining an intrinsic ranking factor for use of a selected word on a selected page in the collection of pages by examining content related to the selected word on the selected page to determine a content score and adjusting the content score in accordance with the page weight of the selected page, and determining an extrinsic ranking factor for use of the selected word on the selected page by, for each linking page in the collection of pages containing an outbound hypertext link to the selected page, examining text associated with the outbound hypertext link on the linking page related to the selected word to determine an anchor weight for the linking page, adjusting the anchor weight in accordance with the page weight of the linking page and combining the adjusted anchor weights for all linking pages containing an outbound hypertext link to the selected page; ranking the selected page for the selected word by combining the intrinsic and extrinsic ranking factors related thereto; and then creating a database of the collection of pages indexed by the plurality of selected words, each indexed selected word in the database index associated with pages ranked for said each indexed selected word so that ranked search results are produced in response to a subsequent query which includes one or more of the selected words.