Guha and the Google Trust Method Patent
October 16, 2009
I am a fan of Ramanathan Guha. I had a conversation not long ago with a person who doubted the value of my paying attention to Google’s patent documents. I can’t explain why I find these turgid, chaotic, and cryptic writings of interest. I read stuff about cooling ducts and slugging ads into anything that can be digitized, and I yawn. Then, oh, happy day. One of Google’s core wizards works with attorneys and a meaningful patent document arrives in Harrod’s Creek goose nest.
Today is such a day. The invention is “Search Result Ranking Based on Trust” which you can read courtesy of the every reliable USPTO by searching for US7,603,350 (filed in May 2006). Dr. Guha’s invention is described in this patent in this way:
A search engine system provides search results that are ranked according to a measure of the trust associated with entities that have provided labels for the documents in the search results. A search engine receives a query and selects documents relevant to the query. The search engine also determines labels associated with selected documents, and the trust ranks of the entities that provided the labels. The trust ranks are used to determine trust factors for the respective documents. 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.
Now before you email me and ask, “Say, what?”, let me make three observations:
- The invention is a component of a far larger data management technology initiative at Google. The implications of the research program are significant and may disrupt the stressed world of traditional RDBMS vendors at some point.
- The notion of providing a “score” that signals the “reliability” or lack thereof is important in consumer searches, but it has some interesting implications for other sectors; for example, health.
- The plumbing to perform “trust” scoring on petascale data flows gives me confidence to assert that Microsoft and other Google challengers are going to have to get in the game. Google is playing 3D chess and other outfits are struggling with checkers.
You can read more about Dr. Guha in my Google Version 2.0. He gets an entire chapter (maybe 30 pages of 10 pt type) for a suite of inventions that make it possible for Google to be the “semantic Web”. lever company, brilliant guy, Guha is.
Stephen Arnold, October 15, 2009
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