Patent ID: 7664735

Claim:
A computing device for ranking documents of a search result, each document having words, comprising: a memory having computer-executable instructions and a processor for executing the computer-executable instructions stored in the memory, the executed computer-executable instructions perform steps comprising: receiving from a user a query; identifying documents as a search result for the received query; identifying keywords of the identified documents; for each pair of identified documents of the search result, calculating an affinity measurement indicating affinity that a document of the pair has to the other document of the pair, wherein affinity measurement is calculated based on the following: aff ⁡ ( d i , d j ) = d -> i · d -> j  d -> i  where aff(d i , d j ) is the affinity measurement of document d i to document d j , document d i represents the document of the pair and document d j represents the other document of the pair, {right arrow over (d)} i represents a vector of document d i , {right arrow over (d)} j represents a vector of document d j , and ∥{right arrow over (d)} i ∥ represents the length of vector d i , each vector having at least one entry for at least one identified keyword of the corresponding document; for each identified document of the search result, calculating information richness for the identified document based on an element of a normalized affinity matrix that is derived from an affinity matrix, wherein the information richness is calculated based on the following: InfoRich ⁡ ( d i ) = ∑ all ⁢ ⁢ j ≠ i ⁢ InfoRich ⁡ ( d j ) · M ~ ji where InfoRich(d i ) is the information richness of document d i , document d i represents the identified document of the search result and document d j represents another document in the search result, and {tilde over (M)} ji is an element of the normalized affinity matrix, wherein the affinity matrix containing the calculated affinity measurement of the identified document and the another document in the search result; and displaying indications of documents of the search result ranked based on the calculated information richnesses of the documents of the search result.