Patent Document ID: 6125361
Application ID: 09058635

Base Claim:
1. A computer including a data storage device including a computer usable medium having computer usable code means for ranking documents in a set of documents in response to a query, the computer usable code means having: computer readable code means for identifying a reference to a second document in a first document; computer readable code means for receiving a lexical distance, the lexical distance defining a number of document terms; computer readable code means for receiving a query including one or more query terms; and computer readable code means for determining a number of times at least one of the query terms is present in the first document within the lexical distance of the reference to the second document, for ranking the documents based thereon.

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Claim 5:
5. The computer of claim 1, further comprising: computer readable code means for receiving a set "U" of documents; computer readable code means for, for at least one test document "u" in the set "U", defining as neighbor documents "N(u)" documents in the set "U" that include at least one reference to the test document "u"; computer readable code means for determining, for at least one document term in at least one neighbor document "N(u)", whether the at least one document term is within a predetermined distance of a reference in the neighbor document "N(u)" to the test document "u"; and computer readable code means for outputting a signal in response to the means for determining whether the at least one document term is within a predetermined distance of a reference.