Microsoft has just put up a patent on a new type of Search Ranking system for their MSN Search Engine called the Nested Search Rankings which William Slawski. Here is an overview on how it works:

1. Takes your Search Query
2. Grab 100,000 pages relevant to your query
3. Rerank these pages according to pre-set MSN factors
4. Pull the top 1,000 pages from the resulting pages
5. Shuffle the order of the 1,000 pages based upon other pre-set MSN factors
6. Take the top 500 from the resulting pages and rerank them according to other MSN ranking features
7. Display the top 10 pages to the user

Now this would definitely change the entire SEO factors for MSN ranking (even though not a lot of people use it) because you would need to find out which factors MSN will use to rank your pages.

Microsoft has placed a patent on this type of Search Delivery (U.S. Patent Application 20060195440 which was published on August 31, 2006 - filed on December 5, 2005) but I can’t find it for some reason in the U.S. Patent Registry.

Here are five of the listed inventors which appeared in the paper High Accuracy Retreival with Multiple Nested Ranker:

• Christopher J. Burges
• Irina Matveeva
• Leon C.W. Wong
• Andrew S. Laucius
• Timo Burkard

Here is the patent abstract:

A unique system and method that facilitates improving the ranking of items is provided. The system and method involve re-ranking decreasing subsets of high ranked items in separate stages. In particular, a basic ranking component can rank a set of items. A subset of the top or high ranking items can be taken and used as a new training set to train a component for improving the ranking among these high ranked documents. This process can be repeated on an arbitrary number of successive high ranked subsets. Thus, high ranked items can be reordered in separate stages by focusing on the higher ranked items to facilitate placing the most relevant items at the top of a search results list.

Hopefully we’ll hear more about this soon!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Search Engine