Google Readying For Both Qualitative & Quantitative Results!!

(Via New Scientist) Google has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms. Patents filed by Google in the US and around the world (WO 2005/029368) reveal new approaches that Google would use in future.Currently the google search engine throws up thousands of "hits" in response to simple entries ranked either in order of relevance or by date, so that the most recent or most focused appear at the top of the huge list disregarding the quality of source.
Google, synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly. 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. The interesting part is that the same system could be roped in to rank other search results, so sales and services could in the future be listed on the basis of price and the reputation of the company involved.