Patent ID: 8903808

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, by a computer system, a selection of a seed set from a linked document corpus, the seed set relating to a topic; calculating, by the computer system, for each document of the linked document corpus, a destination score according to a biased random walk of the linked document corpus, where the random walk is biased toward the seed set; calculating, by the computer system, for each document of the linked document corpus, a source score according to an effect of the each document on the destination scores of other documents in the linked document corpus according to a link structure of the linked document corpus; receiving a query identifying the topic; selecting one or more documents from the linked document corpus according to topic scores based on a combination of the source and destination scores of the documents of the linked document corpus; and returning the selected one or more document as a result for the query wherein calculating, by the computer system, for each document of the linked document corpus, the destination score according to a biased random walk of the linked document corpus further comprises: initializing source scores for the documents of the linked document corpus, such that documents of the seed set have a non-zero source score and other documents have a source score of zero; calculating the destination score for the each document according to a random walk of a link structure of the linked document corpus with random teleportation to documents of the linked document corpus where a probability of teleportation to a document is proportional to a source score thereof.