June 9, 2006

Yesterday, Google has published a new version of its Pagerank patent, Google's proprietary technology for ranking a linked database.

Google's PageRank patent was filed under Lawrence Page, one of the two co-founders of the search company.

As expected, the patent was assigned to The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University under U.S. Patent Number 7,058,628.

The patent abstract is as follows:

A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database.

The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it. In addition, the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document.

The method is particularly useful in enhancing the performance of search engine results for hypermedia databases, such as the world wide web, whose documents have a large variation in quality.

Bill Slawski outlines the changes in the new Pagerank patent on his SEO by the SEA blog, and says that “There are some changes to the document. Many of them appear to be bringing parts of the first two patent applications involving pagerank together.”

1. The references section was updated in this patent to include documents that are listed in the filing granted on September 28, 2004.

2. The abstract section remains the same in the new document, but the claims section was reduced in length, and appears to now cover aspects of both previous patent filings.

3. There are some minor looking changes in the “Detailed Descriptions” section between the version granted in 2001, and the one granted today.

4. The main changes appears in the summary section of the document. In the two previous documents, there were many passages that were repeated, but there were also differences.

Source: Search Engine Journal