The patent, which Google filed on Jan. 30, 2001, and was granted Tuesday, governs methodology for parsing through Web documents to deliver Web surfers the most relevant pages for their queries.

Specifically, it deals with "an improved search engine that refines a document's relevance score based on interconnectivity of the document within a set of relevant documents," according to a summary of the patent.

The invention could affect search companies that are building technology to intelligently rank Web pages in relation to search queries. In the last year, Web search has become one of the hottest markets on the Internet. Many companies are furiously developing advanced tools and techniques that will index the Web more effectively and so, they hope, draw visitors.

As the top destination site for online searches, Google fields more than 150 million worldwide queries every day. When a visitor types a keyword into the search field, its Web servers send the request to an index server, which identifies Web pages containing words that match the query. Document servers with the matching pages deliver links to the visitor in less than half a second, according to Google's site.

The new patent deals with the process for finding matching documents. Under the methodology, Google turns up an initial set of documents related to the keyword and then ranks each page with a "relevance score." Next, it calculates a "local score value" that quantifies "an amount that the documents are referenced by other documents in the generated set of documents," according to the filing. Finally, the local score values influence the relevance ranking of a page.

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