Google patent inventor
Hyung-Jin Kim is Vice President of Search at Google, where he leads core ranking. According to interview notes published in the United States v. Google antitrust case, he spent many years developing the Navboost ranking signal, on which he holds many patents, and he founded Google's page quality team. He has spoken publicly about Google's ranking approach, including at SMX Next in 2022.
All their Google patents on Google PatentsNavboost re-ranks Google results with click data. We read patent US 8,661,029 line by line: long clicks, short clicks, the last click, and what they mean for your pages.
Patent US 8,938,463 builds a prior model of how often a result gets clicked because of how it is displayed, then compares actual clicks with that prediction. The bias features, the formula and what it means for click-based ranking.
Patent US 9,002,867 keeps the click statistics of every version of a page and weights each one by how much the content has changed since. How the difference is measured, when old clicks still count, and what it means before you rewrite a page.
Patent US 8,924,379 classifies pages as new or old from the queries that lead to them, tracks how query refinements change over time, and boosts pages during recurring popularity spikes. The 3 mechanisms and what they mean for fresh and seasonal content.