Google obtains US 7,058,628, a continuation of a 1998 application

On June 6, 2006, US 7,058,628 (Method for node ranking in a linked database) was issued to Google.

It is a Bayh-Dole patent [This invention was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant number IRI-9411306-4. The Government has certain rights in the invention.]

It is based on a continuation application [This application is a continuation, of application Ser. No. 09/004,827, filed Jan. 9, 1998, which claims the benefit of Provisional Application No. 60/035,205, filed Jan. 10, 1997.]

There are only two claims.

1. A computer implemented method of scoring a plurality of linked documents, comprising: identifying a plurality of documents, at least some of the documents being linked documents, at least some of the documents being linking documents, and at least some of the documents being both linked documents and linking documents, each of the linked documents being pointed to by a link in one or more of the linking documents; assigning a score to each of the linked documents based on scores associated with the one or more linking documents; and processing the linked documents according to the assigned scores.

2. A computer implemented method of scoring a plurality of documents, comprising: identifying a plurality of linked documents; identifying linking documents that link to the linked documents; determining a score for each of the linked documents based on scores of the linking documents that link to the linked document; and processing the linked document according to the determined scores.