Patent ID: 8612453

Claim:
A computer-readable memory containing instructions for controlling a computing device to identify web pages for a search result for a query, the web pages being organized into web sites, the web pages of a web site being hierarchically organized into ancestor/descendant relationships, each web page of a web site being a root web page of a subsite of the web site, a subsite includes the root web page of the subsite and its descendant web pages, by a method comprising: receiving from a user a query; identifying web pages that are related to the received query, the identified web pages forming search results for the received query; after identifying web pages that are related to the received query, for each identified web page, calculating a subsite feature for the subsite with the identified web page being the root web page of the subsite based on a contribution from a feature of the identified web page and a contribution from the feature of the descendant web pages of the identified web page, such that the subsite feature is calculated by aggregating the contributions from the feature of the identified web page and from the feature of the descendant web pages and the contribution of the feature of a descendant web page to the aggregating decreases as an ancestral distance between the identified web page and the descendant web page increases; and determining relevance of the identified web page to the query based on the calculated subsite feature of the subsite; and ranking the identified web pages based on the determined relevance.