New GooglePatent Application: Variable personalization of search results in a search engine

United States Patent Application: 0050216434: "Variable personalization of search results in a search engine

Abstract
A search engine provides personalized rankings of search results. A user interest profile identifies topics of interest to a user. Each topic is associated with one or more sites, and a boost value, which can be used to augment an information retrieval score of any document from the site. Search results from any search are provided to the user, with a variable control of the ranking of the results. The results can be ranked by their unboosted information retrieval score, thus reflecting no personalization, or by their fully or partially boosted information retrieval scores. This allows the user to selectively control how their interests affect the ranking of the documents. "

Cre8: Variable personalization of search results - Google - Cre8asite forums bragadocchio writes: "This invention would enable a searcher to fill out a profile, perform a normal search, and then use a slider button to indicate how much his or her personal information from the profile should be used to modify (rerank) that search based upon the personalization information that they have entered into the profile, by sliding the button partially, or all the way to a full influence on the results. "

He highlights the following "interesting aspects of this invention is the discussion on how certain sites are determined to be related to the specific topics.

Quote:

[0045] where nih.gov, cdc.gov, and med.Stanford.edu are various sites that have been determined (either manually or automatically) to be related to the topic "Health". In other words, for each topic in the directory, there is a set of sites that have been determined to be relevant to the topic, and for each of these sites, a boost value is defined.

[0046] The boost for the sites listed in the topical directory is generally determined as follows:

[0047] a) A "site graph" is generated where nodes of the graph are sites (basically, pages on the same host) and edges between nodes are weighted based on the number of pages from one site that link to pages on another. This same type of graph can be used to compute all topic boost maps.

[0048] b) For each topic in the directory, say "Health", a number of sites are selected as "start sites" S0 whose home page is listed in the Open Directory. For example, for a university like Stanford, start sites may be selected as any site ending in .stanford.edu.

[0049] c) A computation is run in two passes:

[0050] i) first identify a set of sites S1 that are linked-to heavily by those sites in S0, with each site in S1 assigned a weight according to how heavily it's linked-to by sites in S0.

[0051] ii) then identify those sites S2 that are linked-to heavily by those sites in S1, weighted as with S1.

[0052] d) The sites in S2 are boosted with their assigned weights."

What Google Blog Search means for your website search results

Why Google Blog Search Matters to Your Business: "According to Google, Google's Blog Search is 'Google search technology focused on blogs'. It includes search engine results specific to blogs not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large....

Google...was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, seems to make a subtle statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches.

Blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.

If search engines are paying attention to blogging that closely, you should be too -- if you want better search engine results. "

Blogs are easy to get listed in the SERPS..."

Google's Blog Search Help Page states:

"If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this."

So if you're already blogging - and responsibly pinging, you're probably already listed." If you are not already running a blog "get started blogging today. You'll be missing out on targeted traffic from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web."

Google Releases Firefox Toolbar

The long awaited google toolbar for firefox browser users has been released....MediaPost Publications - Google Releases Firefox Toolbar - 09/26/2005: "GOOGLE'S FIREFOX TOOLBAR APPLICATION, IN beta testing since early July, was officially released last week with a set of new Firefox-only functions. Among the new features are the ability to rearrange the toolbar interface and move around the search bar, and the incorporation of Google Suggest, which suggests queries based on what the user has already typed"

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO Remove result

Search Engine Journal: "Google Testing Remove Result and Spam Report Options
Matt Cutts confirms that Google is testing a new Remove Result features that lets users of Google personalized search exclude various sites from their search results. If Google Personalized Search users are sick of spam showing up in their results or irrelevant sites being listed, they can simply remove the pages.
From Cutts : One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. At that point, your options would normally be to 1) ignore that result, or 2) report the url to Google via our spam report form. If youre in this experiment, youll have newfound powers. Click the Remove result link and with one click you can drop that url from your search results."

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO UI fun: Remove result: "One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. Heres what youd see. Imagine that you did the search [lynx paw clipart], and you notice one particular result that looks spammy:

You check the cached page, and you notice that if you turn off Cascading Style Sheets, theres a bunch of spammy text:"