The folks at Disney have patented a search engine that ranks and filters out results based on “authenticity” metrics, allowing it to exclude “undesirable” results, which it describes only as “results referencing piracy websites, child pornography websites, and/or the like,” lumping in people trying to watch Finding Nemo for free with dangerous sexual predators.
“[S]imply measuring the number of times a web page is visited or using a popularity index might not accurately convey the utility of a web page to the user performing a search,” reads the approved patent application for Disney’s “Online content ranking system based on authenticity metric values for web elements.”
The application explains that, rather than turn up legitimate sources of the things for which people search, the results “might return references to pages of disreputable sellers and even references to pages designed to push malware to a user’s computer, which may have nothing to do with the desired search.”
Among the various ideas presented in the patent is the notion that “official” websites would be ranked higher than sites that may be more popular or have more links back to them.
It gives the example of the official Disney website page for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs versus an online encyclopedia page for the movie.
When we searched for the movie using Google, the Wikipedia entry was indeed the first link, followed by its imdb.com page, with a Disney website coming in third in the results.
But under the patented search engine, the Disney site, “may be associated with an authenticity weight that is greater than the authenticity weight associated with the encyclopedia web page because Disney.go.com is the official domain for The Walt Disney Company. As such, with respect to the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs film, the Disney.go.com web page may be considered more authoritative (and thus more authentic) than the encyclopedia web page.”
This is a stance that many companies and public figures have tried, to no avail, to convince Google to take, claiming that when someone searches for “Brand XYZ” or “Specific Former Pennsylvania Senator with Unique Last Name,” users are likely looking for the websites for Brand XYX or that Senator, not a retailer who might carry that brand or a scatological slang definition of that politician’s last name.
It’s not known if Disney intends to launch a new search engine — it has one of its own, but it only works on Disney sites — or if this is something it hopes to sell to a company like Google or Microsoft.
For its part, Google — which maintains that most pirates don’t use search engines to find free content — has been trying to demote search results for pirated material. and will promote legitimate sources of content if it’s paid to do so.
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