Patent applications provide window into Google Book Search and Gmail

New patent applications were published today at the US Patent and Trademark Office with the names of Google employees on them. Three look at how documents might be presented in an application like Google Book Search, and the other is an addition to patent filings that describe Google’s email system. Searching scanned documents The initial … Read more

Next steps for online real estate?

Buying a house is one of the biggest decisions that someone can make these days. It’s a life-transforming step, regardless of whether the new home is a few miles away or across the country. And it’s one of the largest purchases many people can make. There are some new looks to sites that focus on … Read more

Fighting search spam with algorithms

search spam

A new patent application from Microsoft describes some ways to identify some of the spam pages that show up in search engine results. The research that led to the application started by looking at something else completely, but a chance discovery turned up some interesting results. So it evolved into an in-depth look at search … Read more

Search roundup

Some blog posts and articles that I came across in the last week that I thought were interesting. Jared Spool, over at UIE Brainsparks, writes about collecting penultimate referrers in The right trigger words. Collecting information about what people search for on your site through an online search function can be a good way of … Read more