Institute for Information, located in Taipei, Taiwan, has brought a patent lawsuit against Google in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. According to the case, the research institution claims Google Search, Google+ Local and Google Places infringes on the Institute for Information's patented information retrieval system. The patent in question was issued to the Institute for Information in January of 2005. Titled, "Information retrieval system with a neuro-fuzzy structure," under US Patent Number 6,845,354, Law360.com stated the Institute for Information's patent covers [...]

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A new Google patent was awarded today named Systems and methods for detecting hidden text and hidden links. The patent was filed on August 25, 2009 by Google's Matt Cutts and Fritz Schneider. It was awarded today after being in pending status for over 3 years. The abstract reads: A system detects hidden elements in a document that includes a group of elements. The system may identify each of the elements in the document and create a structural representation of the document. The structural representation may provide an interconnection of the group of elements in the document. The syste [...]

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The SEO community has been buzzing about a newly discovered Google Patent document named Ranking documents. The patent describes how Google may detect certain "rank modifying" techniques and then adjust the ranking of those documents using those techniques in a manner that will confuse the webmaster into thinking that technique did not work. The purpose is to observe how the webmaster (or spammer) reacts to the change and then make more observations based off the next set of changes the webmaster applies. Here is the specific clause that addresses this in the patent document: When a [...]

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After only eight months, the Google Related toolbar is headed to the dead pool. That's one of several Google products being phased out in the company's latest "spring cleaning" announcement, along with the One Pass payment system for news publishers, Google Patent Search losing its own home page and Google Flu Vaccine Finder. Google Related is was a browser toolbar that offered contextual information about the web page being displayed in the main browser window. For example, when looking at a restaurant's website, Google Related would show a map/address, reviews and similar restaurants/bus [...]

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Googler Killer, Cuil, which launched in June 2008 and went defunct in September 2010, have had their patent applications acquired by Google. Bill Slawski spotted the transfer of ownership of these patent applications this morning. The patents transfer to Google from Cuil include 20090240672, 20090240685, 20090241044, 20090241018, 20090241058, 20090241065 and 20090241066. This is not all that surprising, being that one of the co-founders, Anna Patterson joined Google the same month Cuil went offline. Related Stories: Cuil Goes Offline, Future Not So Cool Anna Patterson, Cuil Found [...]

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The FOSS Patents blog reported that Google lost an important patent case on their Linux server kernels they have been using throughout the company. Bedrock Computer Technologies was awarded $5 million for Google infringing on their patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,893,120) named "Methods and apparatus for information storage and retrieval using a hashing technique with external chaining and on-the-fly removal of expired data." So besides for Google having to pay the $5 million, which is not much to Google, they may have to modify the current kernels of Linux used on their servers and maybe e [...]

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Google Signs Pact With European Patent Office from the Wall Street Journal reports, Google has made a deal with the European Patent Office to gain access to over 1.5 million patent documents. The deal involves Google using their machine translation technology to help the European Patent Office translate the 38 member countries patents. The EPO will benefit in that they will have translated patents and help pave way for a single pan-European patent system. Google will benefit in that they will use the knowledge to better improve their machine translation technology and Google will [...]

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One of the key elements of how the Google search engine works involves the use of the words, or anchor text, that appear in a link on a source page, to describe a page targeted by the link. We know this from statements about anchor text made in documents like the Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin-scribed The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, and the early PageRank patents authored by Lawrence Page - Method for node ranking in a linked database and Method for scoring documents in a linked database. A newly granted patent from Google, Anchor tag indexing in a web crawler sy [...]

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Google’s 10 Oddest Patents by Bill Slawski shares with us some of Google's weirdest patent applications and patents. Here is a short rundown. Bill goes in more detail in his write up. (1) A medical instrument patent (2) A method of depositing metal alloy barrier layers (3) Super charging CDMA technology (4) Baseband direct sequence spread spectrum transceiver, also related to CDMA technology (5) A method of communicating quality of service of network in real time There are five more interesting and weird patents and patent applications at Bill's blog. [...]

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Google may use games to analyse net users from The Guardian reports that Google is considering the idea of using gaming behavior to display targeted ads to that user. Privacy advocates are already voicing their distaste for the idea of gleaning information on users based on their gaming behaviors. To me, this is just like the Gmail ad debate, which has died down since they first launched. Google, which is known to be interested in in game ads, has filed a patent application that Bill Slawski explains as: Google looks at ways of determining user information for use in targeting ads, and d [...]

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One of the biggest stirs of 2005 in the search marketing field was caused by the release of a patent application from Google titled Information retrieval based on historical data. It introduced time as a dimension of ranking pages, with changes in content and linking and advertising and topics as factors to be considered, as well as rates of change. It discussed signals that might send warnings to search engines that some sites might be engaged in spamming the search engine. It covered seasonality and burstiness of topics, and domain name ownership and a myriad of other subjects, introducin [...]

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Is there a Google Phone waiting to be released, or just mobile software that makes it easier for people to use Google to search with? How serious is Google about mobile search? How would such a system work? I ran into a patent application on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) pages from Google that describes a phone system that makes searching on a mobile phone much faster than it is now, but which would require that data be carried over more than one session connecting to the search engine during a single search. I haven't seen this published at the US Patent and Trademar [...]

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Back in October, 2006, Google announced on the Official Google Blog that they were enabling people to create their own custom search engines. If you asked yourself why they were doing this, and how it might provide benefits to individual site owners, searchers as a whole, and Google itself, there are some answers that came out yesterday at the US Patent Office... Google has published a series of five new patent applications on "programmable search engines," with Ramanthan V. Guha listed as the inventor on the patents (his name was also on the announcement linked to above on the Google Blog) [...]

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Google returns results based upon content appearing upon individual pages, or at specific URLs. But that content could come from different authors, who have different levels of control over it. For example, a blog page may have posts written by more than one author, comments penned by others, and advertisements showing ads that even the owner of the site has no direct control over. A forum might have many different authors responding to an initial post, and may also display advertisements. Imagine a system that instead of ranking content on a page level, breaks those pages down and looks at [...]

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One of my favorite search related articles is one that Danny wrote a few years back titled Searching With Invisible Tabs. It stands out because it describes one of the major difficulties involving how search engines work - making a user interface as simple as possible, while still somehow providing information that can meet a wide range of the intentions behind a search. Danny also introduced us to the one box results name used internally by Google for what he described as "invisible tab promotion of some of its specialty content." Are these inserted vertical search results the way to serve [...]

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Clickz columnist Ryan Naraine wrote up some of his thoughts about a Google patent application (Allocating advertising space in a network of displays) that would enable advertising upon electronic displays and billboards in shopping centers and other places, in his article Google Patent Filing Hints at Digital Billboard Ad Network. While New Scientist wrote about the patent filing last week, and I had a writeup on it the day it was published, Ryan does a nice job of providing some context to how this electronic display network might work... Ryan tells us that: If the filing is a sign of th [...]

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A wide range of newly published patent applications and granted patents, covering such ground as subscribed content in search results from Google; tag searching, detecting similar audio files, and simpler support vector machines from Yahoo; geographic based searching from MetaCarta; and data center architecture and smarter results to queries from Microsoft, amongst others... Patent Applications Document access control Google (20070005595) Focuses primarily on setting the ability to access documents for individuals. Where it starts to become interesting is when it discusses checking acces [...]

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Google was granted new patents this week on a methods for estimating similarity between web pages and documents which may help to filter duplicate content, and upon a digital mapping system which appears to be the foundation for Google Maps, and has a number of related map-based patent applications in its wake. Finding Similarity in Pages and Objects The patent on duplicate and near duplicate content, Methods and apparatus for estimating similarity (US Patent 7,158,961), list Moses Samson Charikar as its inventor, and was granted this morning, and originally filed on December 31, 2001. Abs [...]

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Can indexing phrases from pages be an effective approach in identifying and filtering keyword stuffed pages, and honeypot pages aimed at attracting visitors solely to have them click upon ads? A new patent application published yesterday and assigned to Google, Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system, presents a reasonable argument in favor of the method. Ok, so "Phraserank" doesn't appear in the document. But it's a term that might be worth thinking about. It may do much more than just help fight spam. Danny noticed that I had a long writeup this morning [...]

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Back in September, Vanessa Fox at the Official Google Blog shared with us a little information about sitelinks, the groups of links to internal pages that sometimes appear under the top result on a search results page. She also pointed to a page on Google's Webmaster Help Center that provides some more details. A patent filing with a pretty generic name, Systems and methods for providing search results came out last week on these extra internal links. It held a couple of surprises... The first was how much Google relied upon log file analysis and measuring user behavior (including toolb [...]

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