Wednesday 6 December 2006

Search Engine Patents

As mentioned on Danny Sullivan's new Search Engine Land blog, the USPTO has just issued new search-related patents to Google, Yahoo and IBM. There have, indeed, been several search engine related patents issued in 2006. Below are just a few of the more interesting ones, including the new Google and Yahoo patents.

Patents Assigned to Yahoo
Patent 7,146,416 - Web site activity monitoring system with tracking by categories and terms

"The present invention relates to a method and apparatus to provide statistical measurements relating to Web site activity served by a server or a set of servers where the activity relates to particular topics, terms or categories."

7,130,819 - Method and computer readable medium for search scoring

"The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for scoring or ranking results of a search. More specifically, the present invention relates to a scoring approach based on transaction and/or click records."

7,051,023 - Systems and methods for generating concept units from search queries

"The present invention provides systems and methods for enhancing search functionality provided to a user. In certain aspects, the present invention automatically decomposes queries into constituent units that are related to concepts in which a user may be interested."

7,028,027 - Associating documents with classifications and ranking documents based on classification weights

"The present invention relates to search engines, and in particular, to associating documents with classification values, and ranking documents that are associated with classifications based on weights associated with the classification values."

7,007,074 - Targeted advertisements using time-dependent key search terms

"An improved advertisement generation system is herein described that takes into account a previous search term for conducting a search, typically with a search engine, and the time at which the search was conducted, when selecting an advertisement to present to a potential consumer."

6,990,628 - Method and apparatus for measuring similarity among electronic documents

"[T]he present invention [provides] a method and system that measures similarity of documents in a hypertext document system, by combining multiple types of indications of similarity of the documents."



Patents Assigned to Google

7,146,358 - Systems and methods for using anchor text as parallel corpora for cross-language information retrieval

"Systems and methods consistent with the present invention [provide] mechanisms for translating search queries that exploit anchor text in one language that refer to documents in another language to produce good quality, less noisy query translations."

7,136,875 - Serving advertisements based on content

"The present invention allows advertisers to put targeted ads on any page on the web (or some other document of any media type). The present invention may do so by (i) obtaining content that includes available spots for ads, (ii) determining ads relevant to content, and/or (iii) combining content with ads determined to be relevant to the content."

7,136,854 - Methods and apparatus for providing search results in response to an ambiguous search query

"Methods and apparatus consistent with the invention allow a user to submit an ambiguous search query and to receive relevant search results."

7,096,214 - System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results

"A system and method, consistent with the present invention [provides] a mechanism that enhances the ranking of search results by integrating editorial opinion."

7,031,961 - System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository

"The invention relates to the field of information searching and browsing, and more particularly to a system and method for enhancing searches and recommending documents in a collection through the use of bookmarks shared among a community of users."

7,027,987 - Voice interface for a search engine

"[T]he present invention provid[es] a voice interface for search engines that is capable of returning highly relevant results."

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Friday 1 December 2006

Google Donating to Stanford CIS

According to an article in the San Jose Business Journal, Google has pledged to donate $2 million to the Center for Internet & Society at Stanford Law School.

The quotes in the article imply that this money will be used for issues related to intellectual property and copyright in particular. Given that Google seems to be having quite a few issues regarding copyright and trademarks at the moment, (e.g. the Google News copyright decision in Belgium, reports that that Google has put aside a large pot of money to cover copyright issues arising from its acquisition of YouTube, issues arising from its indexing of print publications, being sued in France over a video download/copyright infringement, etc.) this seems very appropriate.

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