Google had filed a patent for “ranking news according to quality (or at least NewScientist says so, I didn’t check).
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google’s database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site. Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
So can you patent something so obvious? It is as trivial as “I take 2 parameters (how many words you say per minute and your height) and I do a weighted sum on them”. Can it be reasonable that you patent weighted sums of A and B?
This is why we should say nosoftwarepatents.com.
Moreover the idea that FoxNews is a “trusted” source because many people visit its site is really bad for me. This is what I call a global trust metric. If I tell Google that I trust Indymedia, then I should receive personalized results (personalized in the sense that the weight given to FoxNews is 0!).
Patenting the obvious: Google and how much a news source is trusted
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