ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,249,118, issued on March 11, was assigned to VIZIT LABS INC. (Boston).

"Systems and methods for using image scoring for an improved search engine" was invented by Elham Saraee (Medford, Mass.), Zachary Halloran (Franklin, Mass.) and Jehan Hamedi (Wellesley, Mass.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method includes storing at least one image performance score for each of a set of images, the set of images comprising a plurality of subsets of images, each subset corresponding with a different web page of a plurality of web pages, the at least one image performance score for an image indicating a likelihood that a user will interact with the ...