Google Lands First Web Search Patent

from the going-intellectual-property-crazy dept

It seems that Google is going intellectual property crazy. First they start going after trademark infringers and now they've received their first search patent for their relevency system of ranking pages based on how many inbound links they have. I know I'd heard about similar systems before Google was around, so I wonder if there's prior art? It will also be interesting to see how actively Google decides to protect their patents.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Feb 2003 @ 11:56am

    strange

    First of all, an algorithm called HITS predates pagerank, and both are based on the interconnectivity of the web. It's similar enough that you could describe it in the same terms from the article "improved search engine that refines a document's relevance score based on interconnectivity of the document within a set of relevant documents."

    Second of all, Brin and Page (the founders of Google) deserve the credit--they're the ones who made Google and Google's original pagerank algorithm. Why does Krishna Barat get it?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    PaulR, 27 Feb 2003 @ 8:40pm

    Re: strange

    This is different than the original PageRank patent--they already have a patent on that. The fact that Google hasn't gotten aggressive with their current patent bodes well. Maybe they only want the patent for defensive purposes. Seems like they understand that technology trumps attorneys..

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.