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 By Bill Slawski,  on February 6, 2011 If you took a look at Google’s patent portfolio recently, you might ask yourself, “What kind of company is this?” Is it a search engine or a smart phone company, a memory module manufacturer or a server maker? Does this company really own the rights to a weight loss patent titled, “Method Of Assaying Satiety Enhancing Tastants,” or is that accidentally listed by error from the patent office?
Google acquired a number of patents over the past few years, either by purchase or by license. Those include a good number of phone related patents from Verizon, patents involving video and streaming data from IBM, as well as hardware-related patents from patent holding companies. A few of the IBM patents are the kind you might license if you want to develop self-driving cars. There’s been a lot of discussion about Google’s many acquisitions of the past year, with 40 mentioned in their September 30, 2010 10-Q filing with the SEC, and a few more since then. But, Google’s acquisition of 77 granted patents from Verizon, and another 51 granted patents from IBM happened with absolutely no media attention as far as I can tell.
I’ve listed Google’s granted patents below, by category, and then by the name of the company that made the assignment of the patents to Google.
Continue reading Google Patents, Updated
By Bill Slawski, on February 2, 2011 There have been a number of news opinion pieces and blog posts appearing on the Web in recent months telling us that Google has become less useful because of web spam from pages scraping content from other site as well as from low quality articles on content farms. Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts responded to those criticisms by announcing some new efforts at Google to make those kinds of pages not rank as well in search results. From the Official Google Blog, on January 21, 2011:
As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly.
The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.
Continue reading Document Level Classifiers and Google Spam Identification
By Bill Slawski, on January 31, 2011 A trio of recently published patent applications from Google, originally filed in 2007, provide a hint at a possible social network from Google, but possibly more importantly give us some insights into how Google might rank objects in social networks such as:
- Communities,
- Forums,
- Members,
- Postings,
- Photographs,
- Blogs,
- Albums,
- Media files,
- Articles, and;
- Documents.
Ranking Social Network Objects, invented by Qingshan Luo, Hang Cui, Bo Zhang, and Dong Zhang, and published January 27, 2011, focuses primarily upon how these different objects might be ranked when found in a social network based upon the type of object involved.
When a search engine ranks a web page, a blog post, or a news article, it can look at things like how often certain keywords appear within those documents. It can see how many pages link to those pages, and look at a number of other signals that might help to rank how those appear in search results.
Continue reading Hints of How Google May Rank Social Networks?
By Bill Slawski, on January 26, 2011 Conventional search engines focus upon the words that they find on a web page rather than the meanings of those words. So, when you search for something like [cooking classes Palo Alto], a search engine might look for all of the pages that it can find that include all of those words. If it doesn’t find many, it might do something called “backing off,” and also show some results that don’t include all of the words.
But, chances are that the search engine might not show results for a slightly different version of that search, such as [cooking class palo alto], where “classes” is replaced with “class.” While “class” and “classes” are related with class being a subpart, or stem, of the word classes, sometimes variations of words have very different meanings when used in different contexts.
Google was granted a patent this week that focuses upon more effectively capturing the underlying semantic meaning behind words within text. It builds upon a patent that Google was granted in 2008 which “characterizes a document with respect to clusters of conceptually related words.”
Continue reading Why a Search Engine Might Cluster Concepts to Improve Search Results
By Bill Slawski, on January 24, 2011 One of the challenges facing someone when they first decide to start a blog is figuring out what to write about, whom to write for, and how to incoporate blogging into their daily routine. This is true for businesses that to decide to add a blog to their website as well.
Coming up with a blog content strategy can make those challenges much easier. The first step involves asking yourself why you’re considering blogging to begin with. Why blog?
Blogging Objectives
One of the first steps you want to take with a business blog is to define what you want it to achieve. That might include:
Continue reading Small Business Blogging Content Strategies
By Bill Slawski, on January 20, 2011 Back on August 20th of 2010, Google Software Engineer Samarth Keshava published a post titled Showing more results from a domain, telling us:
Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site.
The example provided in the post showed seven results from the same museum on a search for exhibits at that museum. He goes on to tell us that in the past, Google would have likely only shown two results from the same domain. In May of 2009, I wrote a post which described when and why Google might show more than two results from the same domain in search results.
My post, Boosting Brands, Businesses, and Other Entities: How a Search Engine Might Assume a Query Implies a Site Search, pointed at a Google patent Query rewriting with entity detection which described when Google might decide to show a number of search results from the same site. The assumption behind that patent was that the intent behind some queries was not so much a request to search the Web for information, but rather was a desire to see specific information from a site closely related to a “named entity” included in the query.
Continue reading Google’s Show More Results (Plusbox) Patent
By Bill Slawski, on January 18, 2011 Microsoft was granted a new patent today, Search ranger system and double-funnel model for search spam analyses and browser protection (US Patent 7,873,635), which provides a detailed look at how Bing might attempt to identify search spammers who redirect traffic from search results pages to pages filled with advertising or other content intended to earn the spammers some money.
The patent uses Google’s Adsense as an example of the kind of advertising that these spammers might use in one of these cloaking schemes.
Ironically, Google’s Matt Cutts also uncovered an interesting Bing affiliate scheme today, from a company that Ad Age calls FaceBook’s third largest advertiser in the third quarter of last year.
Continue reading Irony, Thy Name is Microsoft
By Bill Slawski, on January 13, 2011 Borders Books is struggling, with Distribution Centers and Stores closing. The General Counsel and Secretary of the company resigned at the start of the year. Talks about restructuring the chain are filling the news, and the bookseller is starting to open new stores that look to products other than books to attract customers.
I prefer shopping for books in person, and my local Borders is an inviting place, giving me the chance to browse at my leisure, sit in a comfortable chair and skim through books, or grab a cup of coffee while I decide what I might want to buy.
I rarely see the Border’s website in search results when I’m looking up a book. I don’t see their main competitor, Barnes & Noble, in search results as well. I decided to compare search rankings for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders Books for a number of books.
Continue reading The Real Problem with Borders Books is Search
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