{
  "patent_number": "US 8914392",
  "country": "US",
  "title": "How Facebook Ranks Search Results Based on Your Friends' Activity",
  "original_title": "Ranking search results based on the frequency of access on the search results by users of a social-networking system",
  "summary": "A method for ranking search results by prioritizing links that your social network friends have clicked on previously.",
  "what_it_does": "This patent describes a search engine that personalizes results by looking at the behavior of people you are connected to in a social network. When you search for something, the system identifies web pages and checks if any of your friends or connections have clicked on those links before. It calculates a 'relevant click' score based on how often your friends clicked those links compared to how often the links were shown to them. The system then ranks the search results so that links favored by your social circle appear higher, and it can even visually highlight those results to draw your attention.",
  "what_it_does_not_cover": [
    "Does not cover ranking search results based solely on global popularity or generic page authority.",
    "Does not cover search results ranked without using social graph connections or degrees of separation.",
    "Does not cover systems that do not track the ratio of clicks to displays for specific links.",
    "Does not cover search results that ignore the user's specific privacy or access preferences."
  ],
  "filed": "2012-09-04",
  "granted": "2014-12-16",
  "expires": null,
  "status": "active",
  "holder": "Facebook Inc",
  "holder_url": "https://patentbrief.org/company/facebook-inc",
  "inventors": [
    {
      "name": "Jeffrey Winner",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/jeffrey-winner"
    },
    {
      "name": "Nicholas Galbreath",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/nicholas-galbreath"
    },
    {
      "name": "Christopher Lunt",
      "url": "https://patentbrief.org/inventor/christopher-lunt"
    }
  ],
  "times_cited": 66,
  "tags": [
    "software",
    "ai_ml",
    "ecommerce"
  ],
  "abstract": "Particular embodiments access a search query submitted by a first user of a social-networking system; identify one or more web pages in response to the search query; for each of the one or more web pages, determine a value indicating a number of user clicks associated with the web page by one or more second users of the social-networking system who are connected to the first user within the social-networking system; and send a set of hyperlinks for the one or more web pages, wherein hyperlinks for web pages where the value is greater than zero are visually emphasized over other hyperlinks.",
  "url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/8914392/facebook-events",
  "markdown_url": "https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/8914392/facebook-events/md",
  "google_patents_url": "https://patents.google.com/patent/US8914392",
  "relatedPatents": []
}