The NY Times reports that Google, Apple and Napster were all sued by Jonathan T. Taplin's Intertainer for patent infringement of a 2005 patent. Intertainer's patent covers commercial distribution of audio and video over the Internet. I believe this is the patent application filed on November 24, 2005, named "Digital entertainment service platform." Google, Apple and Napster have not commented on the lawsuit. [...]

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Mobile search has its own rules, and if you want your pages indexed for people searching with handhelds, it may help to take a look at some of the patent applications that have come out lately from Microsoft and Google on the topic. Microsoft provided some details about what they are looking for in a patent filing from September, Mobile friendly internet searches. They note there that they will only index some pages for their mobile search. And Google... Google underscores that same point in a patent filing from this last week. I have more about the patent application and some of the de [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | Legal: Patents | SEO: Mobile Search

Judge dismisses lawsuit against Google at BusinessWeek covers a patent infringement case against Google over AdSense and Google Toolbar's AutoLink feature being tossed out. The case was brought by HyperPhrase Inc. against Google. The judge dismissed the infringement claims, calling the AdSense claims "nonsense" and finding that AutoLink "performs a completely different function in a different way to achieve a different result." [...]

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Some processes covered in patents granted last week by the US Patent and Trademark Office: Microsoft reranking results based upon redundancy of information, Ask reranking pages based upon affinities between searchers, Hewlett-Packard creating queries for searchers to investigate from scanned documents, and; Exalead forming dynamic query refinements from words found in documents located within search results. A number of new patent applications were published also, which involve search in some manner. Microsoft describes targeted contextual advertising in alerts, and debuts two versions of [...]

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Google patented "Graphical User Interface" from Dirson notes that Google was granted a patent today on its "graphical user interface" that most of us would call its search results page. Perhaps that might stop some of the copying going on! Seriously, I can't find enough about the patent to see how extensive it might be or what exactly it covers. You'll find the actual filing here. Bill Slawski might be along in a bit to dig deeper into the patent. Here are the three screenshots from the filing: Postscript, from Bill Slawski: While a utility patent protects the wa [...]

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Three new search related patents were granted yesterday at the US Patent and Trademark Office to Yahoo, Google, and IBM. The Yahoo Patent looks at how to measure the buzz around categories, topics, and terms from their use at the Yahoo Portal. Google's filing focuses upon matching anchor text to find related documents in different languages. IBM's document discusses an unstructured information management and a two level searching technique. Yahoo's Buzz This patent had me wondering how Yahoo presently measures trends in topics searched for on their search engine and portal, selected in t [...]

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