The Chatterbox

New Google Patent

In case you hadn't heard, Google has applied for a new patent that is quite interesting. It's a rather long read, but it's pretty much devoid of tech-speak, so the average person should be able to understand it all.

Basically, it points to the fact that Google may be looking at the Age (or history) of pages and links. The interesting point is that they do not state if new links will be giving a big bump, or less than they have historically. Or if old links are going to be better trusted, or be considered "stale". Or if they're going to use some sort of sliding scale where new links start off not giving a lot of weight, then more and eventually fading into the stale category.

It's a good move on Google's part not to give out the specifics on that front IMHO.

The document also portends to look at the history of each document/page in their index. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean they'll be looking at the If_Modified server header that gets sent when a document has been re-uploaded with or without changes. The way I read it they're going to be looking at if solely from Google's perspective. When the document first became known to Google via their spider crawls, if the page has changed, how much has changed, what elements of the page has changed, what percentage of change, etc.

Personally, I rather doubt that on-page portion is going to make a lot of difference in ranking. My guess would be that they'll be looking a lot more closely at link history since links are such a force with their algorithm.

FWIW, I also believe this is pretty much what has been going on since at least November 2004 in the now infamous "Florida" update. Parts of it actually goes back much farther than that, to at least the April 2004 time frame. Don't believe me? Stock, aka Grumpus, made a post on Jill Whalen's HR Forums back in April of some new crawl behaviors he had noted. Stock studies this stuff constantly and has been doing so for years. I trust his observations and assessments because he has a very good track record of not only pulling out the important bits of information, but also of not screaming "The sky is falling, the sky is falling" every time something changes. Like so many seem to do. ;-)

So the question is why would Google file a patent application? Especially one that is quite broad in some areas? Double especially when they've already been using it for months at the point the application was filed and they'd been working on it for at least a year?

I honestly have no clue since it's something they've already been doing. The only thought that comes to mind is that maybe, just maybe they're getting ready to dump the old PR (PageRank) name, which is a patent held by Stanford University (a non-factor IMO), opting for some new name.

But what would that gain them?

Well, a few things come to mind immediately.

First, it would definitely throw all of those PR chasers/abusers for a serious loop. My sense is that Google has never much liked the idea of a whole link brokerage springing up with everyone being so focused on how much PR the linking page had to send. Remember that it's always been Google's stance that links should exist solely for the good of visitors, a concept some of us have been pushing for years now.

Second, it would make a break from Stanford's patent and be a clear signal that Google is a lot different now than when it was originally developed back in the 90's. And forestall a lot of the conspiracy theorists out there who complain that Google shouldn't be able to use either the PageRank name or algorithms since they belong to Stanford. FWIW, this is pure bunk. I don't remember where anymore, but I read a statement from one of the higher ups at Google a long, long time ago that clearly stated that Google had what amounted to a perpetual license to use PageRank however they wanted.

Third, and possibly most importantly, simply filing the application (for something they're already doing) and giving it a name is likely to generate a huge amount of positive press for Google. Seriously, I can see the headlines in all of the major publications already. "The New Google!" "Google Enters The 21st Century!" "Google Boys One-Up MSN and Yahoo!"

If I were a betting man, that's where I'd be placing my wager. But then again, I have no crystal ball.