Patent Document ID: 8429157
Application ID: 13253527

Base Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of re-ranking sponsored search results by a search engine in response to a search query, the method comprising: retrieving, by a search engine, one or more organic search results and a plurality of sponsored search results (“search results”), along with respective rankings of the one or more organic search results and the plurality of sponsored search results, associated with a search query; determining, by the search engine, a degree of association between each sponsored search result and the other search results through analyzing web links between the plurality of sponsored search results, the one or more organic search results, and other web documents to or from which the search results are at least indirectly linked; re-ranking, by the search engine, the plurality of sponsored search results based on the degree of association between each respective sponsored search result and the other search results; and storing in memory, by the search engine, the plurality of re-ranked sponsored search results in relation to the search query.

---

Claim 3:
3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: delivering the search results, by the search engine, to a web graph, wherein the web graph contains a plurality of interlinked web documents each represented by a node (u 1 , u 2 , . . . u n ), and is stored on one or more computers coupled with the search engine; and retrieving, by the search engine, values of one or more operators based on the relative linking within the web graph between the one or more organic search results, the plurality of sponsored search results, and any of the plurality of web documents, each of which corresponds to a node in the web graph.