Ranking Of Books And Other Long Documents In Search Results

Bill Slawski breaks down a newly granted Google patent searcher interfaces for a document search engine that sheds some light on how Google may use information retrieval and searcher interfaces for relevant search results for a query. It focuses on rankings of longer organic content such as books, or newsletters, or catalogs in search results.

More and more types of documents are becoming searchable via search engines. This includes documents such as books, magazines, and/or catalogs, scanned with their text recognized via OCR.

This patent tells us that it is beneficial to present information about those and other types of documents in a way that is useful to searchers seeking such information. I have seen such search results from sources such as books included on search results, and this patent reminds me of many I have seen like that.