Patent Document ID: 8484193
Application ID: 12503813

Base Claim:
1. A method in a computing device for determining importance of documents with links between documents, the method comprising: generating transition probabilities of transitioning between pairs of source and target documents based on a determination of information available through each target document of a source document, each source document having one or more links to target documents of that source document, the transition probability for transitioning from a source document to a target document is based on the number of links on that target document and the total number of links on the target documents of that source document; storing the generated transition probabilities in a transition probability matrix; calculating importance of documents based on a stationary distribution of the generated transition probabilities stored in the transition probability matrix, the stationary distribution including stationary probabilities of visiting documents; and storing the calculated importance of the documents.

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Claim 8:
8. The method of claim 1 wherein the calculating of importance is performed iteratively until the stationary probabilities of visiting the documents converge on a solution.