Patent ID: 7792833

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for ranking search results, comprising: determining a first property associated with each document in a collection of documents; wherein the first property is a language type associated with the document that identifies a language of the document; wherein the language of the document is determined by performing a statistical analysis of a character distribution in the document and comparing it to a trained language character distribution; storing an identified language for each of the documents when it is determined that the identified language is not a default language in a language storage that is a query independent rank (QIR) storage that is separate from a QIR storage that stores other values used at query time; determining a query language of a search query; estimating a ranking value corresponding to properties for each document, wherein the ranking value corresponds to a measure of the relevance of each document based on the search query; ranking each document that is responsive to the search query to obtain the search results, wherein each document is ranked based on the estimated ranking value and a comparison of the query language with the first property value; ranking the documents according to a scoring function (score) that is determined according to at least: a computed click distance (CD), a weight of a query-independent component (w cd ), a weight of the click distance (b cd ), a weight of a URL depth (b ud ), the URL depth (UD) and a click distance saturation constant (K cd ); and using the ranking of the documents to display the search results.