SEO by the Sea

There was news this week about being able to get directions and map information from Google at kiosks located at certain gas stations, as well as coupons. Might we see more from Google at kiosks sometime soon?

Maybe magazines that could customized and printed at kiosks? The gas station kiosks wouldn’t work as a printing station. They use a receipt printer for maps and coupons.

Imagine going to an interface like this one through your computer, or at a kiosk:

Continue reading Google Magazine – About Whatever You Want (Soon at a Kiosk Near You?)

I’m on the road, visiting the main offices of Key Relevance in Texas, many miles from home. I brought my laptop with me, but somehow ended up leaving the power cord home in Delaware. Tonight, while checking for newly granted patents, I came across one naming Lawrence Page as inventor, and The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University listed as the assigned owners of the patent.

The new patent is Scoring documents in a linked database, filed December 1, 2004, and granted September 11, 2007. In a number of ways, it is very similar to Method for scoring documents in a linked database, also from Page and Stanford but filed July 6, 2001, and granted September 28, 2004.

As much as I would like to stay up all night looking at Stanford’s new patent, I have about an hour and 1/2 of battery time left. I’d love to compare and contrast the two documents, and point out things like the expanded claims section of the newer document to 14 claim statements in the new document, compared to only one in the earlier version.

Continue reading Need Your Help With This New Stanford PageRank Patent

Google has a number of patents listed at the USPTO that have little to do with search.

I thought it might make a fun post to make a list of some of the ones that made me scratch my head a little, and wonder why Google might be interested in things like a waterproof cellular telephone case, or a medical instrument that can be “introduced into an animal or human body.”

A number of them appear to describe aspects of the way Google sets up their computer systems, which I also thought people might be interested in. Some others involve wireless communications networks. Here’s my list of the Oddest Patents from Google:

1. Instrument for medical purposes

This medical instrument uses ultrasonic sound to investigate the structural makeup of biological tissue in organs and vessels. An image from the patent:

Continue reading Google’s 10 Oddest Patents

I’ve wondered why an occasional post from here sometimes showed up in the news sources that appear in Google Finance. I now have a little clearer understanding of how they perform their news gathering.

If you use Google Finance, and want to know a little more about how it works, or are just interested in how Google might tackle providing information in a narrow field in a meaningful manner, you may want to check out two newly published patent applications from Google on their finance offering: Computing a group of related companies for financial information systems, and Interactive financial charting and related news correlation.

Both of them take deep looks at how to present financial information that might make it easier for people to use and to understand how news may impact the prices of stock. Both documents overlap a great deal, and share a detailed description and abstract. The abstract tells us:

Techniques are disclosed by which users looking for financial information about publicly traded or private companies may richly and interactively navigate both pricing and material news information about those companies. The techniques facilitate and encourage the user’s use and understanding of financial information presented. Related company information can also be provided to the user, where related companies are organized by hierarchal categories for a meaningful display.

Continue reading Patent Filings on Google Finance Provide a Glimpse at Google’s Financial News Gathering

In The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page officially presented Google, and its use of hypertext to index documents on the Web and produce better search results.

If you’re interested in discovering how search engines work, there aren’t too many other starting points that might be better than that document.

A new patent granted to Google this week, System and method for selectively searching partitions of a database, gives us a deeper glimpse into the inner workings of a search engine and its index.

It describes how partitions can be used to make it faster and easier to search through the index of a search engine, and how rarer and less common results for queries might be kept in an extended index, which is also the topic of another patent granted to Google earlier this year that shares the same list of inventors and was filed on the same day, which I wrote about in Google Patent on Extended Search Indexes.

Continue reading On Supplemental Results, Partitioned Indexing, and Extended Indexes

A new patent application came out last week for the “send to” function for email, IM, and blog posts on Google’s toolbar. It inspired me to take a look back at the history of the Google Toolbar.

December 11, 2000 — Google Launches The Google Toolbar

This first version of the toolbar let people search sites and the Web, find the location of search terms on pages, highlight those search terms, access cached versions pages, search for related pages, and view the toolbar pagerank for pages.

Continue reading Google Toolbar History

How would you feel if you arrived at Google, and it suggested some recommended Web pages for you before you even entered a query in the search box?

I wrote about a paper a little over a year ago which discussed that possibilty, in New Papers at Google Labs.

That post is primarily about one paper, Retroactive Answering of Search Queries (pdf). A new patent application from Google, available at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), describes a very similar process for a search engine to recommend alerts to searchers.

The inventors listed in the patent filing, and the authors of the paper are different folks, but there’s a great deal of overlap from paper to patent application.

One addition in the patent that isn’t in the paper is a user’s Web History to help identify a searcher’s standing interests.

Continue reading Recommended Alerts From Google

I’ve never really used sidebars that pull in information from a bunch of different sources, like the one available with Google’s Desktop Search.

Perhaps if a sidebar showed the right information, I might be tempted – Twitter and Facebook updates, new comments on your blog, search alerts on topics of your choice, and others. I’m sure I could come up with a big list of things that would make me tempted to run a sidebar.

I did come across a series of patent applications from Yahoo, which describes a sidebar that appears to focus primarily upon providing alerts for emails, updates from community networks and other information sources.

All of these documents were filed in 2006, and published this past week. It’s difficult to tell if what they describe is the sidebar that Yahoo offers to AT&T users, or something more than that.

Continue reading Yahoo Sidebar Patent Applications