Patent ID: 7844590

Claim:
A method of collecting search result ranking information for statistical analysis, the method comprising: for a particular destination page, collecting referrers used to access the particular destination page, wherein said referrers include Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of search results pages from a plurality of different search engines; when a referrer of the referrers corresponds to a results page from a search engine of the different search engines, then: parsing, by a computer system having a processor and memory, the referrer to identify the search engine, search query, and search results page number; associating an Internet protocol (IP) address of a user computer with the parsed referrer; collecting the associated IP address along with the identified search engine, the search query, and the search results page number for the particular destination page for statistical data, wherein the search result ranking information comprises the associated IP address, the identified search engine, the search query, and the search results page number; generating a search engine comparison report and programmatically incorporating the statistical data into the search engine comparison report wherein, for each search engine of the search engines and from calculated usage statistics for locating and accessing the destination page, the search engine comparison report separately indicates search queries used to access the destination page, a number of users who submitted each search query, and the search results page number; and generating a supplemental web server access log from collected search activity data; wherein the generation of the search engine comparison report is based on the collected search activity data and the collected associated IP addresses.