Google’s New Patent

There is always great interest within the search engine marketing community whenever a search engine files for a patent. Search engine giant Google was granted a new patent last Tuesday, August 22, 2006 . The title is “System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results“. And here is a brief summary of the patent.

US patent 7096214 : For each web page/site identified as favored and non-favored, the editors may determine an editorial opinion parameter for that site… For each web page in the result set that is associated with one of the web sites in the set of affected web sites, the server may determine an updated score using an editorial opinion parameter for that web site.
Some of Google’s patents in the past have given us insight into the influence of anchor text, fresh content, themes, data history, link popularity, user behavior, and domain-related information. However, Google’s most recent patent application shows a shift from focusing on algorithm-based process to the integration of a human editorial process. Ultimately, Google is striving to create the best possible search results for their visitors. This patent proposes one possible method for doing that.

As of now, search engine algorithms have reached their peak. We’ve known for quite some time that an algorithm-based search engine can nevër deliver excellent results. Why, you might ask. Simply because there will always be people out there trying to outdo the system by reverse-engineering it.

Due to this problem, a number of solutions have evolved. One of these is social search engines, which rank their results based on the wisdom of people. Another solution to arise from this problem is a human editorial process.

And now, Google in its new patent application has proposed a hybrid mechanism which combines algorithmic search with a human based editorial process. By integrating editorial opinion, they are looking to enhance the quality of their search results.

The new Google patent describes the process of identifying favored and non-favored sources in order to improve search results.

Favored Sources: Websites that are identified as being useful or containing authoritative content on the desired topic.

Non-Favored Sources: Websites that are identified as sources of misinformation or over-promotion on that particular topic.

To summarize, Google is trying to patent a system for identifying good sites and bad sites in order to rank them accordingly in the SERPs. They have proposed a semi-automatic system for determining favored and non-favored sources.

Thus an online marketer should also put more thought into the quality of the pages of his site delivers as a whole. This is one of the very few patents that refers to a site as a whole rather than individual pages.

For the smart Google SEO, this should not change his methods. As always, quality content will be the key. If you are providing your visitors with relevant, quality content, then the search engines will reward you.

It will be interesting to see how Google evolves over the next few years. Algorithm based search results will continue to be problematic because there will always be those who try to beat the system. Implementing some sort of human editorial opinion into the ranking process seems inevitable.

Also this is true for all of the major search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AskJeeves must all provide quality search results to compete within this industry. To be truly successful, they will have to go beyond algorithm-based results to deliver the most value for their visitors.

Source : Site Pro News