The ultimate vote for a page is if someone bookmarks that page for later use. Well, maybe it is not the ultimate vote, since I have tons of orphaned bookmarks that I never visit. But if search engines can capture one's bookmarks with date stamps including frequency of use and date added, that can be a valuable measurement used in determining page importance.
A thread at Search Engine Watch forums, and I am sure discussed at many other forums (it has been a busy week), members discuss this as a possibility. In fact, in the recent patent released by Google, it discusses more then sandboxing concepts, it discusses monitoring "data maintained or generated by a user, such as "bookmarks," "favorites,"." Nacho pulled an excerpt for that portion, in the thread;
"According to an implementation consistent with the principles of the invention, user maintained or generated data may be used to generate (or alter) a score associated with a document. For example, search engine 125 may monitor data maintained or generated by a user, such as "bookmarks," "favorites," or other types of data that may provide some indication of documents favored by, or of interest to, the user. Search engine 125 may obtain this data either directly (e.g., via a browser assistant) or indirectly (e.g., via a browser). Search engine 125 may then analyze over time a number of bookmarks/favorites to which a document is associated to determine the importance of the document.
[0115] Search engine 125 may also analyze upward and downward trends to add or remove the document (or more specifically, a path to the document) from the bookmarks/favorites lists, the rate at which the document is added to or removed from the bookmarks/favorites lists, and/or whether the document is added to, deleted from, or accessed through the bookmarks/favorites lists. If a number of users are adding a particular document to their bookmarks/favorites lists or often accessing the document through such lists over time, this may be considered an indication that the document is relatively important. On the other hand, if a number of users are decreasingly accessing a document indicated in their bookmarks/favorites list or are increasingly deleting/replacing the path to such document from their lists, this may be taken as an indication that the document is outdated, unpopular, etc. Search engine 125 may then score the documents accordingly."
So the thread asks, will you soon see more Web site asking you to "bookmark this page"? Or better yet, will they run scripts that automatically bookmark the page for you, without your knowledge?
