Patent ID: 7779001

Claim:
A method of evaluating content on the Web comprising: identifying a plurality of pages on the Web; identifying a plurality of nodes, each node associated with a hierarchical structure to which at least one of the pages corresponds; grouping the plurality of pages to the corresponding nodes; for each node, determining a first value based, at least in part, on the linking relationships between that node and the other nodes; for each page, determining a unique second value based, at least in part, on characteristics of that page, wherein the characteristics of that page includes a level value representing a hierarchical level of that page within the hierarchical structure of the corresponding node to which the page corresponds, wherein the unique second value is uniquely determined for each page based on the level value; for each node, identifying inter-links of pages corresponding to the node, wherein the inter-links represent links that point to the pages corresponding to the node and that are included in other pages corresponding to other nodes; aggregating the identified inter-links; determining a third value based, at least in part, on the total number of aggregated inter-links and as a variable that represents a relative weight distribution between the identified inter-links and intra-links for the node, such that the relative weight distribution represents an inverse relationship between the weight of the identified inter-links and the weight of the intra-links for the node, a predetermined value of the variable would indicate that inter-links having more relative link weight than the intra-links; determining the first value for the node based, at least in part, on the third value; and determining, storing an importance value and outputting for each page based, at least in part, on the unique second value associated with that page and the first value associated with the node to which the page corresponds and a reputation value, wherein the reputation value is an indication of the influence of host's importance on the overall importance of the page.