Positive and Negative Quality Ranking Factors from Google's Blog Search (Patent Application)

Google’s blog search shows results in responses to searchers queries based upon a combination of relevance scores and quality scores.

The relevance scores are based upon the search query terms entered into the search box by a searcher, and use traditional styled information retrieval scores for documents. These scores could be created by looking at:

• Number of times search terms appear in a blog post.
• Places where search terms appear within the document (such as title or the text within the body of the post),
• Characteristics of search terms appearing on the pages (such as font, size, color, etc.),
• Search terms may be weighted differently from other search term when multiple search terms are present.
• Proximity of search terms when multiple search terms are present may influence the IR score, and;
• Other techniques for determining the IR score for a document can also be used.

In addition to a relevance score, the search engine looks at a quality score. A new patent application from Google discusses possible positive and negative ranking factors that might go into that quality scores that might be used byGoogle Blog Search, and provides some explanations for each of those factors.