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/businesses.

In its announcement today, Google says “the product isn’t experiencing the kind of adoption we’d like, and while we still believe in the value provided to our users, we’ll be retiring the existing product over the next few weeks.”

As I said, that’s just one of several announcements. Here’s a quick look at some of the others:

• Google Patent Search is going away. Formerly available at www.google.com/patents, Google says it’s now offering a better patent search experience through Google.com, and plans to add more patent search features there in the future.
• Google One Pass has been shut down. This was the company’s payment system for publishers that launched in February 2011. Google says it’s working with its partners to transition to Google Consumer Surveys and other platforms.
• Google’s Flu Vaccine Finder has been passed over to HealthMap and relaunched there as the HealthMap Flu Vaccine Finder.

There are also API- and mobile-related announcements, along with a couple related to Picasa, on Google’s blog post.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan:

When Google Related rolled-out last August. I can recall some worries by some that this was going to push Google products unfairly over publishers. As one person commented back at the launch:

I run a restaurant guide website. When I browse a restaurant page on my site, it pops up offering me links to: Google’s Place page for the same restaurant; the Google maps page for the same restaurant; links to Google places pages for other restaurants nearby; some web results to other competitors sites. Perhaps some of this is useful to the user, but the abundance of links to Google properties makes me more than a little sceptical as to the true intentions here.

If that was really Google’s plan, this stands as a testament that just because Google releases something, that’s no guarantee it’ll do well. See also Google Buzz, Google Wave, Google TV….

On a personal note, telling us that the Related team will now “focus on creating more magic moments across other Google products” just sounds like Google is going way over on the marketing speak. Related didn’t work. Got it. But “magic moments?” Just give us some products that work, and that will be magical enough.

As for Patent Search, I’m just waiting for someone from Google to complain that it’s not really closing that service, since it’s just “redirecting” it. Yeah, it’s closed, and there’s nothing magical about that. Google wrote:

We’re redirecting the old Patent Search homepage to google.com to make sure everyone is getting the best possible experience for their patent searches.

How on does dumping people who were going to a dedicated vertical search engine on patents to the Google home page which searches the entire web by default become “the best possible experience.”

If you want to do patent searches, you have to be one of the few people who may have caught Google’s post today and noted that there’s an advanced patent search page that’s also being offered. Why not just redirect Google Patent Search to that page? That would have been the best possible experience.

Postscript 2 From Danny Sullivan: Turns out, trying to reach the old Google Patents site at patents.google.com redirects you to the Google.com homepage but with a filter in place to search only against patents. It also says that in the search box, “search patents,” but I totally missed this. That’s much better than I thought, but I think it’ll still be confusing to some.

Related Articles

• Google Launches Google Patents, Full-Text US Patent Searching
• Google Flu Shot Locator Shows Where To Get Vaccines Near You!
• Once Condemned Google Now Hailed By Publishers For One Pass
• Google Related Toolbar Shows Google Content As You Surf
• Google Shuttering Buzz In Favor Of Google+; Farewell To Labs
• Let’s Celebrate Google’s Biggest Failures!
• Where Are They Now? Products Announced During Past Google I/O Keynotes
• Will The New Google TV Partners Be Enough To Help The Platform?

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 Founder, Returns To Google
• Cuil Launches — Can This Search Start-Up Really Best Google?
• Cuil Announces New Layout, Other Updates
• Cuil Launches Timeline To Search Results
• Cuil Jumps On The Real-Time Search Bandwagon
• Cuil Fast Test – Relevancy Isn’t A Google Killer
• Cuil Maplines: A Good Idea That Needs Work
• Google To Gain Access To Over 1.5 Million European Patent Documents

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 even the Android mobile operating system.

The decision was made by the court on April 15, 2011 and was published electronically yesterday. Below is an embed of the decision.

Google told The Register:

Google will continue to defend against attacks like this one on the open source community. The recent explosion in patent litigation is turning the world’s information highway into a toll road, forcing companies to spend millions and millions of dollars defending old, questionable patent claims, and wasting resources that would be much better spent investing in new technologies for users and creating jobs.

Bedrock Computer Technologies didn’t only sue Google in 2009, they sued Softlayer Technologies, CitiWare Technology Solutions, Yahoo, MySpace, Amazon.com, PayPal, Match.com, AOL and the CME Group. But Google’s suit was the first to go to trial.

According to the court, Google infringed two different points within the patent. First being information storage and retrieval system comprising of:

• a linked list to store and provide access to records stored in a memory of the system, at least some of the records automatically expiring
• a record search means utilizing a search key to access the linked list
• the record search means including a means for identifying and removing at least some of the expired ones of the records from the linked list when the linked list is accessed
• a means – utilizing the record search means – for accessing the linked list and, at the same time, removing at least some of the expired ones of the records in the linked list

The second was “information storage and retrieval system according to claim 1 further including means for dynamically determining maximum number for the record search means to remove in the accessed linked list of records,” according to the FOSS blog.

Here is the verdict:

11-04-15 Verdict Form Bedrock v. Google

Related Stories:

• Google Sued For Patent Infringement Over AdSense
• Xerox Sues Google & Yahoo Over Search Patent. Copy That!
• Google Bids Nearly $1 Billion For Nortel Patent Portfolio
• Paul Allen Refiles Patent Suit Against Google, Facebook, Yahoo & Others
• Oracle Sued Google Over Patent Infringement Of Java Within Android
• Intertainer Sues Google For Patent Infringement On Online Video & Audio Distribution

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 gain around 1.5 million documents, adding 50,000 new patent grants yearly to Google’s patent database.

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 system, may provide a more detailed look at the mechanics of using anchor text as a relevancy signal for a page being linked to by the search engine. It also describes some other processes about using links to rank pages and about crawling websites. I’ve written a detailed breakdown of the patent at SEO by the Sea in Google Patent on Anchor Text and Different Crawling Rates.

Danny asked me if I might hit on some of the highlights of the document here.

Link Discovery and Crawling Layers

Links are at the heart of the patented process, and the discovery of links is done in at least three different ways – direct submissions of URLs, crawling of URLs, and submissions of content containing links through syndication methods like RSS.

The crawling of URLs may be done in three separate layers, based upon factors that could involve how frequently the content at those URLs may be updated, and what PageRank or page ranking they may have:

• A base layer, in which most known URLs are sectioned into segments, and those segments are crawled during a specific period such as a day, in a round robin manner until all are visited by robots programs
• A daily layer, in which a smaller group of URLs that have a higher crawl score, crawl frequency, or both, may be visited over the same period of time that segments are crawled in the base layer.
• A real time layer, in which an even smaller group of URLs which have even higher crawl scores, crawl frequencies or both, may be visited in much shorter intervals such as minutes or hours.

The patent provides some simple formulas which define crawl scores and crawl frequencies, and also a directed approach that may favor URLs in specific categories, such as news sites and pages in specific languages or in certain file formats.

Link Logs, Anchor Maps, Duplicates, and Annotations

When a crawling program visits a URL, it may collect lists of links and content from pages in a link log which can be sent back to other programs that look at page content, at duplicate content on pages, at duplicate file structures at hosts, and at text both from anchors of links and from a distance surrounding the links.

URLs that contain duplicate content may be reviewed, and one URL may be chosen as a canonical, or best, version with the possibility that the other duplicate or duplicates are then ignored.

Identifying duplicate file/linking structures at different hosts may also result in one version being identified as a version to continue being indexed, and the other or others as versions to be ignored in the future.

The patent tells us that it is possible that anchor text in links pointing to duplicate URLs may be considered as anchor text pointing to the canonical version of those URLs.

Information about changes to pages is determined at this stage, and link maps and anchor maps are made from the link logs.

The change information may impact the frequency with which specific URLs are crawled, and together with something like PageRank, may determine which of the three layers a URL may be placed within.

The link maps may be used to determine a page ranking, such as PageRank, for documents at the different URLs.

The anchor maps may be used to associate anchor text and additional “annotation” information with the URLs that they point at, and that text and annotation information may be used in conjunction with other information to determine relevancy of a page to different words and phrases.

Here’s an example from the patent that I paraphrased in my post:

For example, a link pointing to a picture of Mount Everest might read “to see a picture of Mount Everest click here.” The anchor text might be the “click here” but the additional text “to see a picture of Mount Everest” could be included in the link record.

Robots and Temporary and Permanent Redirects

A robot crawling through links found at URLs might come across redirected links, and the patent tells us that temporary (302) and permanent (301) redirects are treated differently.

Temporary redirects are identified and recorded, but will be followed by a robot.

Permanent redirects are also identified and recorded, but instead of being followed by a robot, information about them is sent back to a scheduling program that may crawl the URL being redirected to at another time.

Conclusion

It’s important to note that this is a patent written to protect Google’s intellectual property in the processes described, but may not describe the processes that Google has actually implemented, or may only describe some of the processes being used. The patent is also 4 years old at this point, and there’s a possibility that Google may be doing some things very differently now.

But the processes that are described do seem to correspond well with many observations about things such as the behavior of Google’s crawling processes and the use of anchor text as a relevancy signal, helping to determine the relevance of pages being pointed towards by those links for certain queries.

(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.

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 determining and serving relevant ads in video games. They take into account a person’s interests and gaming behavior by monitoring and making inferences from their online gaming activities.

The Open Rights Group said, “I can understand why they are interested in this, but I would be deeply disturbed by a company holding a psychological profile.” The Guardian explains that Google can learn a lot about a user within one of these online role playing games such as Second Life. Google would love to show ads that are relevant to the user.

The Guardian spoke with Google, which said “it did not have any plans to roll out the technology in the near future.” When and if Google launches these ads, I am sure there will be a spark of controversy at the onset which will die down over time.

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, introducing rates and frequencies of changes to web pages, and investigating how freshness and staleness might play a role in determining relevancy.

Two years later, the Historic Data patent application seems to have re-emerged, and cloned itself under a number of names, with expanded claim sections that detail different aspects of the processes described in the original. Our friend Miguel Cuesta from google.dirson.com wrote a post today on two of the Google Applications which were published this morning. I covered two others from last week at SEO by the Sea.

There doesn’t really seem to be much that is new in these documents when held up to the original from 2005. But, if you hadn’t paid much attention to the different parts of that document, it might be worth revisiting.

• Document Scoring Based on Query Analysis
• Document Scoring Based on Traffic Associated with a Document
• Document Scoring Based on Link-Based Criteria
• Document Scoring Based on Document Inception Date

A look through the transaction database at the USTPO provides a little information, and shows that the original document was given a non-final rejection by the USPTO, which means that there may have been some issues in the original that needed to be addressed. It’s difficult to pinpoint what those issues were based upon the information that they provide.

Another patent application published by Google that is considered to be a “child” application of the original Historical Data document is also worth a look if you missed it the first time around – Systems and methods for determining document freshness

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 Trademark web site yet, so the link below is the the WIPO version.

Added: another patent application from Google published this morning, focuses upon a nonbrowser software application that people can use on their phones to search with Google and read emails….

Overloaded Communication Session USTPO Version Publication Number: WO/2007/013958 International Application No.: PCT/US2006/028142 Publication Date: 01.02.2007 International Filing Date: 21.07.2006

Int. Class.: G06F 7/00 (2006.01) Applicants: Google Invented by Maryam Kamvar, Shumeet Baluja, and Elad Gil

Abstract:

A method of providing information responsive to a request from a wireless communication device involves receiving an information request from a mobile device and generating responsive information for the information request, transmitting a first portion of the responsive information to the mobile device in a first communication session, and transmitting a second portion of the responsive information to the mobile device in a second, overloaded communication session

This search system may use more than one or two connections to a search engine to speed up the reception of information from a search, parsing out results to searches in multiple sessions (For instance, instead of showing ten results to a search, it may show the first five from an initial connection to the search enigne, and then while a searcher is looking at those, return the next five results.)

It could use regular cellular networks of voice over IP (VOIP), and be used upon PDAs and laptops, as well as phones.

Search results might be displayed as text upon a screen, or as audio, and could also include video.

Images of a possible User Interface for a Google Mobile Search system:

This patent application doesn’t tell us whether or not Google will build and release a phone, or just software, and its publication doesn’t mean that there is or isn’t some more news from Google on mobile search upcoming soon.

Added (March 22, @ 4:00pm EST):

Customized data retrieval applications for mobile devices providing interpretation of markup language data Invented by Elad Gil, Shumeet Baluja, Maryam Kamvar, and Cedric Beust US Patent Application 20070066364 Published March 22, 2007 Filed: September 19, 2005

If Google were to release a phone software application that could be used on many different types of phones, it might be very much like the software described within this patent application.

From the patent images and patent description, it appears that one could use it to search the Web, Maps, Froogle, and other Google databases. Local searches can show maps, phone numbers to call, possibly offer text messaging and emails to a listed business, and directions.

Web pages followed in search results would be displayed in a format that may be appropriate for display upon the phone instead of using the formatting indicated in the pages’ HTML (though the application does understand HTML, and would translate a page for display.) This application would not be a browser, and according to the patent filiing, would not have an address bar that people could use to type in web pages and surf the Web.

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). From reading through the patent filings, I’m thinking that it’s safe to assume that the “programmable search engines” described are Google’s custom search engines, though the applications may describe aspects that may differ somewhat or may not have been fully developed yet.

Ramanathan Guha is listed as the sole inventor on these documents, and he has an interesting history. He joined Google in May of 2005, and had been a principle scientist for Apple Computer and for Netscape, a Co-founder and the CTO of Epinions, one of the developers of the RDF Site Summary (RSS) 0.9 standards, and has a rich resume of other accomplishments.

These are the patent filings covering the programmable search engines published this week:

• Programmable search engine
• Aggregating context data for programmable search engines
• Sharing context data across programmable search engines
• Generating and presenting advertisements based on context data for programmable search engines
• Detecting spam related and biased contexts for programmable search engines

The easiest way to learn about the features of Google’s custom search engines is to create one or two, so I’m not going to go into depth describing what the patent filings say about those. The sections involving the background of the invention are pretty interesting, though. I’m going to summarize parts of those to see if they can provide us with some insight into why these were developed and offered by Google.

Search as an unchangeable black box

We’re told that work on information retrieval systems mainly is focused upon improving search result quality, and is typically is measured in terms of how precise those results are, and how many results are recalled. While there may be other quantifiable ways to measure performance, those are two of the main goals.

Techniques used by Web search engines involve designs which encompass basic indexing algorithms and representation of documents, query analysis and modification, relevance ranking and results presentation, and many other methods. However they function, the processes search engines use are controlled internally, and can’t be changed by outside entities.

In other words, search engines operate as black boxes, receiving and processing queries using complex and preprogrammed algorithms and models which rank relevance to provide and order search results. Even if parts of the process are known, the search engine will only operate according to those algorithms and models.

Difficulties with User Intent

The relevance of search results depend upon a user’s search intent: why they are searching and why do they need the information? Two different people using the same query may be looking for completely different answers.

Attempts to solve this problem are often based upon relatively weak indicators, such as static user preferences, or predefined ways of refining queries, often amounting to educated guesses of user interest based on the query terms. These approaches can fail because of the highly variable nature of intent and situational facts that query terms may not clearly indicate.

Context and Informational Needs

The patent filing presents an example of a search using the query “Canon Digital Rebel.”

Does a searcher looking for that term want to buy the camera, or do they own it and want technical support, are they comparing it with other cameras, or may they be interested in learning how to use it?

Those situational facts, and a searcher’s information need cannot be reliably determined by either analysis of query terms, or by looking at previously stored preference data about the user.

The Failure of Inferring Intent by Tracking

Intent might also be inferred by tracking and analyzing prior user queries so that a model of a user’s interests might be created. Search queries from individual users might be collected, so that interests may be determined based on a frequency of key words appearing in search queries, as well looking at which search results the user accesses. See, for instance, Retroactive Answering of Search Queries (pdf).

The assumption that queries can accurately reflect a user’s short term or long term interests may be a problem.

Another potential problem is the assumption that there may be a direct and identifiable relationship between a given information need, such as shopping for a digital camera, and the query terms being used to meet that need. We’re told that assumption is incorrect because the same query terms can be used by the same (or different users) with quite different information needs.

Turning to Specialized Web Sites

Because people can’t consistently rely on search engines to locate information to satisfy their informational needs, they often visit sites offering highly specialized information about particular topics, built by individuals, groups, or organizations with an expertise in those subjects.

These sites, vertical content sites, often include specifically created content providing in-depth information on a topic, as well as organized collections of links to related sources of information.

So, a site about digital cameras may include:

• Product reviews,
• Guidance on how to purchase a digital camera,
• Links to camera manufacturer’s sites,
• Price comparison engines,
• Other sources of expert opinion, and;
• Other helpful information.

People running these sites, subject domain experts, often have considerable knowledge about the value of other sites on the Web. Using their expertise, these content developers can also best structure their site’s content to address the variety of different information needs of users.

A Need to Share Search with Subject Matter Experts

Someone visits one of these vertical content sites, where they find a good amount of useful information related to their needs. They may then return to a general search engine to find more relevant information. But when they do, the expertise they found at the vertical content site is no longer available to them from the search engine.

It’s not unusual for vertical content sites to provide search fields letting people access a general search engine. But those just pass search queries back to the general search engine.

Can the expertise of the owner of the vertical content site become available to a search engine during a searcher’s query, to provide more meaningful search results? If the search engine was a custom one, with some aspects of it programmed by the vertical site owner, it might allow their expertise to be shared with the searcher, with other similar sites using custom search engines, and with the search engine.

Aggregated context information might also be collected from a number of these programmable search engines, and become available to searchers even when they are entering a search at the general search engine instead of at a vertical search site.

Other Aspects of Using Programmable Search Engines

In short, custom search engines at vertical sites allow people to search using content sources decided upon and possibly annotated by the site owners. Information collected from the source choices and the labeling and annotation of those sources, and from the use of those custom searches may help inform results at other custom search engines involving related searches, and in query suggestions offered by Google on search results pages from regular Web searches.

A couple of other important topics are each discussed in individual patent applications – advertising and spam or bias.

Of course, Google would want to show advertisements with search results. Can the context (or user intent) taken from such searchers be used to inform the content of advertisements shown to searchers, or associated with the content shown on one of these vertical search pages?

There is a potential that people will try to abuse a system like this. The patent application focusing primarily upon “spam related and biased content,” describes filtering processes that may be used to avoid abuse.

Conclusion

If you haven’t tried out Google’s custom search engines, they are very easy to set up, and to use. If you own a site that focuses upon a particular subject, and consider yourself an expert on that subject, your expertise in setting up a custom search engine may influence results on other custom search engines from Google, and in suggestions on Google’s results pages in response to certain queries.

The only issue that I have with these patent applications is that they appear to assume that people setting up custom search engines on specific topics are experts on those subjects. Yet, if you visit a site on a topic, and find value and expertise upon the site, you may find value and expertise in a custom search set up on that site, too.