Breaking Down Google's New Search Patent Application

Still haven’t found time to read through that pending Google patent that all the search forums are abuzz with? Never fear, others are breaking it down for you.

Google’s Patent: Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data Rand "Randfish" Fishkin
at SEOmoz nicely summarizes the five most critical concepts he finds:

1. Document Inception: How Google could determine the age of a page or site through various means.
    
2. Rank Impact Of Content Change: How Google might decide when "fresh" content is more important than static content, how to tell when fast build up of links or
   content might be good — or bad — and other factors of change that may be factored into ranking.
    
3. Spam Detection: Means of potentially spotting spam by looking for "off-topic" link growth, speed of link gain, similarity in anchor text and other issues.
    
4. What Google Could Measure: When a domain is registered, how long, DNS records, clickthrough rate, time spent on page, personal bookmark lists, files in your cache,
   frequency of visit and more are things that all might be measured by Google and potentially used to influence rankings.
    
5. Impact On Search Marketers: Actually, little is covered here other than to say that to him, this patent seems to verify things people have been saying Google has
   been doing on various forums over the past two years.

On that last part, I’d say actually this patent application seems to cover many things that people have long speculated any search engine might do. And as I wrote before,
whether Google is actually doing any of this is uncertain. I have no doubt some ideas expressed are being used. Other ideas probably aren’t.

Spotted via SEO Book,
Google Patent Analysis from the Wolf-Howl blog is another good summary of key factors coming out of the application.

Over at the Search Science blog, New Google patent proves "sandbox"
exists from Xan Porter is actually his take on why the patent doesn’t seem to explain the sandbox operation some feel Google has been following.

For further resources, see the rundown on forum threads I covered in my earlier post: New Google Patent May
Give Sandbox & Inner Workings Info.

Want to discuss? Join our forum thread, Does New Google Patent Validate Sandbox Theory?.