Searching For Free Samples For Paid Content? Patented!
from the *sigh* dept
One of the bigger questions in dealing with online search is how to deal with content that's behind a subscription wall. Earlier this year, Yahoo tried to address that somewhat by cutting deals with various paid content sites to let people see those results in their search results. Of course, you couldn't actually click through and read them unless you had an account with the specific source you were looking at, but it was at least a start. Now there's a new search engine that's trying to go a step further. It's working with subscription content providers to make some of their content searchable, with the idea that readers would be able to view some of the results for free. It's not entirely clear how they'll do this, but it may involve only letting you view a single result for free. In other cases, publications may limit the total number of "free views." Of course, thanks to the wonderful world of business model patents, the company claims it's patented this "business model." Once again, this hardly seems like something that should be patentable. It's likely that plenty of others have thought of it in the past, but decided it just wasn't worth doing. Why not let the idea compete in the marketplace, rather than holding patent protection over it?
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irritating, granted....
- Hopefully they put a nice big green dollar sign icon by the "pay to read this!" articles...
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Re: irritating, granted....
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