Patent Document ID: 8706721
Application ID: 13177389
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A computer implementation method of creating referral links between documents and scoring a plurality of documents based on these created referral links, comprising: identifying a plurality of people who have all collected referral signals to documents and identifying those referral signals; identifying the plurality of documents identified by the referral signals of the plurality of people; creating referral links between source and sink documents from among the plurality of documents, where the link strength between the source and sink documents is based on the number of referral signals from common referrers to both these documents, wherein when there is only an increase in the number of referral signals made by referrers exclusively to the source document, then the link strength from the source document to the sink document decreases; and wherein when there is only an increase in the number of referral signals from common referrers to both the source and the sink documents, then the referral link strength from the source document to the sink document increases; assigning a relevance score to each sink document, based at least in part on the relevance score of each source document with a non-zero referral link to each sink document and the referral link strength from the source documents to the sink documents; and processing these documents according to the referral link strengths or the relevance score associated with each document.