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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