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The ranking algorithms of the search engines
in the near future
Last week, we took a look at the
most innovative search engines in 2003 and which patents
have been issued to the search engine companies in 2003.
These patents allow us to predict some of the future search
engine ranking algorithms. Now that the patents have been
issued, the innovations can finally be used.
What will Google do?
Google has been issued patent
no. 6,526,440 which is very interesting. It says (in non-technical
terms) that the search engine may return a set of web pages
and re-ranks them by evaluating the number of links between
the web pages in the set.
For example, a user searches for "kitchen chairs"
and Google finds 30 good results in its database. Now the
top ranked web page will be the one that has the most links
from the other 29 web pages. (This is just an example, Google
may evaluate more than 30 results, or it could look at the
quality of the links in the set instead of the quantity.)
This means that it might be worthwhile exchanging links with
other top ranked web pages for your keywords in the future.
Patent
no. 6,615,209 allows Google to compare two web pages for
similarity by comparing only those parts of the web pages
that are related to the search term.
This could mean that doorway pages might be more easily detected
than before. (We've always warned
against using doorway pages.)
Microsoft's plans
In the description of patent
no. 6,525,748 Microsoft explains that "sitemaps may
also be utilized by web crawler programs to build an index
of web pages available at the server site."
Some months ago, we recommended using sitemaps
to improve your search engine rankings. Now they could
become even more important to get most of your web pages indexed.
Microsoft's patent
number 6,513,031 describes a way to return search results
that are based on a user profile. For example, if you have
a daughter called Mercedes then Microsoft's search engine
may return not only search results for the Daimler-Chryler
car model.
Yahoo!'s interesting patent
Yahoo! has been issued an interesting patent.
The search engine tracks purchases of the search engine user
so that future search results can be based on the number of
sales on a web site.
But how should Yahoo! be able to track purchases on foreign
web sites? This method will probably only work when buying
at Yahoo stores.
If you like this kind of information, please recommend our
newsletter to your friends and clients.
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