Patent ID: 7974970

Claim:
A system for detecting artificial promotion of a resource, comprising: computer readable program code operative in conjunction with a processor, the computer readable program code including code forming a search engine operative to index a set of incoming links (“inlinks”) which reference the resource; a log module coupled with the search engine and configured to store log data associated with the set of inlinks; a partitioning module coupled with log module and operative to partition the set of inlinks into a plurality of groups of inlinks based on at least one partitioning scheme; a statistics module coupled with the partitioning module and operative to compute a statistic associated with the inlinks within each of the plurality of groups of inlinks; a computation module coupled with the statistics module and operative to process the computed statistic associated with the inlinks of each of the plurality of groups of inlinks and compute a metric associated with the set of inlinks, wherein the metric indicates a level of uniformity of a distribution of values of the respective computed statistics among the plurality of groups of inlinks, and wherein the search engine places a list of search results, generated in response to a search query, in a pattern based on the metric.