(August 10, 2006)--College of Computing Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) division Professor Hongyuan Zha was recently awarded two U.S. patents for technology that's behind the Yahoo! search engine. Zha says both patents were developed when he worked for Inktomi Corporation which was later acquired by Yahoo! Inc. Zha was one of the five brightest computer scientists locked inside a laboratory for 18 months to devise a solution to one of the web's most frustrating problems: irrelevant search results. In June of 1999, the team emerged with a solution which has earned Zha the following two patents:

U.S. patent 7028027 titled Associating documents with classifications and ranking documents based on classification weights develops search engine ranking algorithms that deliver relevant documents based on the regions that the users belong to (region is a concept that is similar to country but is more refined), as well as algorithms for identifying the regions of web documents.

U.S. patent 6990628 titled Method and apparatus for measuring similarity among electronic documents describes algorithms for measuring the similarity among web documents by utilizing the textual contents, hyperlink structures, and click-through patterns.

To read an article related to this technology's development, click here.