GOOGLE has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms.
The ambitious system is revealed by patents filed in the US and around the world (WO 2005/029368) by researchers based at the company鈥檚 headquarters in Mountain View, California.
At the moment the company鈥檚 search engine throws up thousands of 鈥渉its鈥� in response to simple entries such as 鈥淚raq鈥�, which lead to news websites. These are ranked either in order of relevance or by date, so that the most recent or most focused appear at the top of the huge list.
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This means that articles carrying more authority, say from CNN or the BBC, can be ousted from the first page of results, simply because they are not as recent or as relevant to the keyword entered in the search line.
Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google鈥檚 database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.
Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
鈥淎rticles carrying more authority, say from CNN or the BBC, can be ousted from the results, simply because they are not as recent鈥�
The patent also reveals that the same system could be roped in to rank other search results, not simply news. So sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved.
