Patent Document ID: 8082246
Application ID: 12828508

Base Claim:
1. A method for ranking search results, the method comprising: storing document and link information for documents on a network; generating a representation of the network from the document and link information, wherein the representation of the network includes nodes that represent the documents, the nodes including at least two high authority nodes and other nodes; assigning to each high authority node a click distance value set by an administrator; setting initial click distance values of the other nodes to a predetermined value; computing click distance values for the other nodes with a computing device, the click distance values for each of the other nodes being a number of the links traversed on a shortest path to a closest of the high authority nodes; and ranking search results using the click distance values of the high authority nodes and the other nodes as a query-independent relevance measure.

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Claim 3:
3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising storing the ranked search results in memory, wherein the ranked search results comprise a list of at least some of the documents arranged in a descending order of relevance.