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.
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