Google’s Home Page Clears United States Patent Office

Gawker reports Google’s home page patent application, which was filed back in March 2004, has finally been approved yesterday, September 1, 2009. The patent is for the simplicity of the Google home page.

Here is a picture of the patented home page:

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: It’s unclear yet whether Google intends to enforce its patent against other search engines that might feature a “clean” home page, such as Bing. If they tried, I think the patent would get defeated. Plenty of search engines prior to Google’s 1998 launch had clean pages. I’m kind of amazed they got a patent here. If we have more, we’ll update.

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Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.