Christine Churchill has an article at Search Engine Watch on Understanding Search Engine Patents that’s worth a look.

In it she describes some of the potential pitfalls of placing too much credibility in a patent application released by one of the search engines. It’s a warning worth heeding.

In addition, she describes four presentations on search engine patent applications at a recent Search Engine Strategies conference. I wish I could have seen these presentations. It’s a good thing that Christine has shared them with us.

I spend some time every week digging through the new patents and patent applications from Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others. Some interesting stuff shows up, from time to time.

For instance, would you consider comparing blogging to an infectious disease? A paper on how infectious diseases spread has inspired a couple of patent applications from IBM on Blogging, and how information spreads through blogs.

Continue reading Blogs as infectious diseases: how much faith do you give to search engine patents? →

There have been a few stories in the news this month about the costs behind running a search engine like Google. Thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at them, and see where some of the money goes.

The high cost of jetting around the globe, by the founders of Google, was an early story broken by the Wall Street Journal, who uncovered information about a purchase of a jet for Sergey and Larry. In Google founders’ heady purchase (no longer available), we hear a little about new luxury Boeing 767-200 intended to save a few dollars while letting the heads of Google fly where they want.

Office space for the search giant was another topic that emerged lately. There are some nice pictures of new Google Office spaces on real estate blog Curbed. Take a look Inside New Gooooogle’s New Chelsea Oooooffice. The pictures are of unfinished office space, but it’s a lot of space. Would love to see what it looks like once it’s been fixed up some.

Thinking about how much furniture will cost for this space, a more important question might be how much money it costs to run all of the thousands of computers one might find at a Google Data Center. Google’s vice president of operations, Urs Hoelzle, discusses that very topic in How Google battles its increasing power consumption . Just considering it makes my own utility bills much more easy to stomach.

Continue reading The Mundane Realities of Running a Search Engine on a Budget →

If you haven’t tried out Windows Live (now Bing) yet, you might want to give it a look. You’ll want to do that with Internet Explorer, because it isn’t quite ready for Firefox (it is a beta, but you would figure that Microsoft could have waited a day or three to work with Firefox, too.)

I tried it out earlier, and there’s some nice drop and drag features, that let you set up a home page the way you might want it. Is Microsoft catching on? Or is this something they’ve been trying to get right for years?

The Financial Times looks at some of Microsoft’s earlier attempts to provide online services to people, with mentions of services from the end of the 90s that didn’t quite make it. In Microsoft ogles Google’s goodies, we get a sense of how the advertising model that Yahoo! started and Google has perfected may be the type of thing that lets Microsoft see some success offering online information services.