Google patent application for ranking news

I was actually looking for a description of how Google News "clusters" stories about the same topic, when I ran into this. The first illustration shows, well, a computer network. The next one, a standard pc architecture. Then... a table.

I have zero experience with patents, so I'm wondering: is this the typical standard of quality? You have an algorithm that you don't really want to describe, you want it to look like it's not a software patent, so you just show some images of pc hardware?