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Become.com Patents Search Engine Technology
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
AIR™ Technology Assigns Link-Based Quality Scores to Produce Relevant, Spam-Resistant, Search Results
Sunnyvale, CA -- Become.com (http://www.become.com/), the Web’s fastest-growing site for comparison shopping, has had their Affinity Index Ranking (AIR™) technology patent approved by the US Patent Office.
Become’s AIR technology, invented by Rohit Kaul, Yeogirl Yun, and Seong-Gon Kim, assigns relative rank values to links (web page) by analyzing quality points in a nodal network. Rather than rank pages based on keyword saturation and position, AIR strives to provide the most relevant pages higher positioning while avoiding vulnerability to the artificial Web that such conventional link analysis often falls prey to.
"We are extremely pleased about our patent. AIR technology provides a more intuitive ranking that isn’t spammed through keyword stuffing," says Become’s CEO and founder Michael Yang. "Our shoppers want relevant product information while comparison shopping on Become.com and AIR delivers it."
"The web contains a substantial amount of spam, and AIR is effective in suppressing the rank of such pages," Rohit Kaul explains. "In AIR, a link is an attempt to endorse which is validated only if that incoming link has a higher value; as a result websites using spam techniques such as link-farms are automatically assigned low ranking."
While the patent proposal discusses AIR ranking in terms of electronic circuits or mechanical springs, in August 2009 a white paper, also written by Kaul, Yun and Dr. Kim, was also published as a contributing article in Communications of ACM. The white paper (‘Ranking Billions of Web Pages Using Diodes’) discusses the practical importance of AIR when compared to other ranking algorithms against spamming.
About Become.com
Become.com is a global leader in comparison shopping and lead generation spanning several verticals, including product shopping and education. Become.com delivers qualified leads to businesses and helps consumers find products and services using its world-class search engine. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, CA, with offices in Tokyo, London, Karlsruhe and Milan, Become.com operates numerous sites including become.co.jp, become.co.uk and education.become.com. Become.com was founded in 2004 by Michael Yang, who was also a founder of comparison shopping engine MySimon in 1998. Investors in Become.com include TPG, Transcosmos, and EFF.
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