This very exciting patent was signed by Google in the latest version in October 2017 and has the status "Application status active". The patent describes how the ranking scoring of documents is supplemented based on a trust label.
The trust factors are used to adjust information retrieval scores of the documents. The search results are then ranked based on the adjusted information retrieval scores.
The information about the labels is collected by a crawler and sent to the search engine system . This information can be from the document itself or from referring third-party documents in the form of link texts or other information about the document or entity. These labels are linked to the URL and recorded in an annotation database.
In one embodiment of the present invention, a web crawler (not shown) obtains labels and trust information and sends it to search engine system 100 to facilitate subsequent usage in search result ranking.
Users can assign additional signals to a document and/or the philippines phone number data publishing entity, for example, via a trust button or via a list in which the user can specify which topics they trust the entity for. This information is stored in a trust database and a trust factor is determined for each document based on it. The names of the users and the labels rated are displayed openly in the SERPs together with the respective search result.
The trust button is just one way of providing user feedback. However, the patent states somewhat vaguely that all forms of signals can be used that provide information about the trust relationship between the entity and the user. For example, the frequency with which the website of the respective entity is accessed can provide information about the level of trust.
The system can also examine web visitation patterns of the user and can infer from the web visitation patterns which entities the user trusts. For example, the system can infer that a particular user trust a particular entity when the user visits the entity’s web page with a certain frequency.
These trust signals can also be assigned indirectly via the website of a third entity that in turn trusts the first entity.
The information from the trust database is then also used to rank the documents.
A document’s trust factor is a function of the trust ranks associated with the entities have labeled the document with labels that match the query labels. The search engine 180 adjusts each document’s underlying information retrieval score using the document’s trust factor, and then reranks the search results using the adjusted scores.