Patent On Ranking A Document Based On Original Content And Ways To Identify Which Content Is Original Content.

Bill Slawski breaks down a newly granted Google patent Ranking content using content and content authors that sheds some light on how Google may use this in Search.

One way this patent identifies original content is to identify the first document in a body of documents. It also touches on things like ranking a document containing original content more highly than a document that contains no original content, ranking a document based on the proportion of content copied from another source and much more