Google's Trust Ranking Patent Shows How User Behavior Is A Signal

Google long ago filed a patent for ranking search results by trust. The groundbreaking idea behind the patent is that user behavior can be used as a starting point for developing a ranking signal.

The big idea behind the patent is that the Internet is full of websites all linking to and commenting about each other. But which sites are trustworthy? Google’s solution is to utilize user behavior to indicate which sites are trusted and then use the linking and content on those sites to reveal more sites that are trustworthy for any given topic.

PageRank is basically the same thing only it begins and ends with one website linking to another website. The innovation of Google’s trust ranking patent is to put the user at the start of that trust chain like this:

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