In November, security firm Sunbelt Software found that hundreds of ads placed on Web sites by DoubleClick, the largest ad-serving platform on the Web, linked to pages designed to install malware on users' desktops.

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The site also gets money from bricks-and-mortar outlets that advertise on InfoSpace, an Internet yellow pages linked to Ehow.

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The second problem is that as you will see reading through the comments to the various pages linked above, the actual thing that has been patented is both trivial and obvious: and patents are not supposed to be granted for things that are either trivial or obvious.

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Hence our trust of Google, which ranks a web page by how many other pages are linked to it, and how many other searchers view the page in question.

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The twist that the Kleinberg approach has added is that as well as working out which pages are much cited (ie, linked to), it also works out which pages do the most citing and can therefore act as jumping-off points for those interested in a subject.

ECONOMIST: Hits and misses

He theorized that just as the credibility of an academic work is often weighted by the number and diversity of other works it cites, the importance of any given Web page could also be determined by the number of other pages to which it is linked.

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That may be how Google results can turn up Web pages people naively consider private, since they're not linked to or from anywhere.

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