It might not be too long before your mouse movements may influence your ranking in Google search results. A new patent has been granted to Google to track the position of the mouse cursor of the user. The patent is named “System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring” and is invented by Taher H. Haveliwala. The patent was filed way back in 2005. This patent allows Google search engine to collect information when users hovers mouse pointer when viewing a search result page.
Till now the search result which has higher click through rates are ranked higher by Google. But there are many instances when a user gets the required results from the search results page without clicking on any links. Consider that some one is searching for the price of a particular product. On the search result page he gets the price from a snippet and he would be satisfied with the price. Once he is satisfied, he would no bother to click on the link, instead he would go for some other search activities. But the fact is that the user might hover his mouse pointer on the result from which he got the price.
In this case the website to which the user got the result snippet should be ranked, as it provided the answer to the user’s query. This is where the new patent comes into play and when Google notices that a lot of users hovered over that particular website’s snippet containing the price it would naturally rank that site more higher. Even if the search result with large number of mouse hover is much lower down the search results, Google would tend to put the result in a higher position.
The duration of the mouse hover would also help in better rankings as a user would point his cursor over a snippet for a long time reading the snippet, it he finds it relevant to his search query. The movement and speed of the mouse pointer is also taken into account, as the user always reads the snippet moving his mouse pointer over the text at a normal speed.
Anyway this patent is going to be another milestone in the search Industry and chances are that this would be implemented by other search engine giants in the future. This would also helps us to get more relevant search results as more relevant websites would be pushed up in the results page based on the user mouse movement and behaviors
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