Google Patent Scores Documents Based On Inception Date

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Well now web pages have a “birth date” in Google, thanks to a new patent invention by Matt Cutts. The new patent application creates a method for determining a document’s inception date, and then using that date to rank other documents.

Analysis of United States Patent Application: 0070094254

This patent covers giving a web document an inception date (the date the document is first found and indexed by Google as the first priority), and then ranking search results partially based on this new value. The document covers the ways in which the inception date will be used.

The abstract is brief and clear:

A system may determine a document inception date associated with a document, generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the document inception date, and rank the document with regard to at least one other document based, at least in part, on the score.

Here’s the basic information, as I understand it.

• The inception date will be the day that Google first finds and indexes the page. This, again, places a huge emphasis on freshness and being first to market.
• Other methods of determining the freshness of a document are the domain’s date of inception, date of incoming links, or date that the document is mentioned on an existing page.
• They can use the server timestamp if need be
• This document inception date will be used to determine the link acquisition rate mentioned in their other patent filing from the same day.
• The document inception date won’t be used in isolation, but will also be considered in relation to the inception dates of other documents

Yet another interesting read if you want to see what philosophy Google is pursuing these days.

What do you think of this new patent filing?

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.