Patent ID: 7630964

Claim:
A method performed by a computing device for establishing a relationship between relevance of a web page to a query based on a URL of the web page, the URL having levels, each level having a number, the method comprising: providing a training set having queries, web pages with URLs, and indications of whether web pages are related to queries; establishing from the training set a relationship between relevance of a web page to a query and the distance between the depth of a URL term of the URL of the web page that matches a query term of the query and the depth of the URL, the depth of the URL being the number of levels in the URL and the depth of a URL term being the number of the level of the URL that contains a query term and based on content relevance of content of the web page to the query; calculating by the computing device prior probabilities indicating that a web page is relevant to a query based on distances of a matching URL term; and establishing relevance of a web page to a query, the web page having content with terms and a URL with URL terms, the query having query terms, the relevance being established based on the calculated prior probabilities of a URL term of the web page matching a query term and based on comparison of terms within the content of the web page to the query terms.