August 2015 Archives - SEO by the Sea ⚓

How Google may Identify How Related Different Entities Are

A patent granted to Google this week attempts to identify similarities between different types of entities, when it finds information about them on the Web. It refers to these types of similarities as commonalities, as in things they may have in common. Google may use these similarities in a number of ways, such as supplementing search results containing related information based upon results that might be in the same category or possibly located in the same region.

The things identified as common may be for things that are moderately unique, but not completely rare.

The patent say “entities,” but it seems to be focusing upon different businesses that might share some similarities. For example, they refer to a food critic writing about restaurants a few times and tell us that the things such a critic might write about different restaurants might be used to find similarities between those places.

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Uber Assigns Nine Mapping Patents to Microsoft

On June 23, 2015 Uber Technologies assigned 9 patents to Microsoft, in a transaction that was recorded at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on August 18, 2015.

These patents and their abstracts are listed below, and they link to full copies; all of them are related to Mapping, which was an area that Microsoft was supposedly going to be outsourcing to other companies, including Uber. I haven’t seen anything anywhere else that explains this transaction or says anything about the cost behind it.

I tried making sense of it by looking at articles about Uber and Microsoft, but they seemed to show a good relationship between the companies:

June 29, 2015 – Uber acquires mapping tech and talent from Microsoft
June 29, 2015 – Uber grabs Microsoft mapping assets and employees
June 31, 2015 – Microsoft Said to Invest Big Sum in Uber
July 6, 2015 – Microsoft’s map sale to Uber sends all the wrong mobile messages
July 31, 2015 – Microsoft’s Investment In Uber Is A Head Scratcher
August 3, 2015 – Microsoft: What Software Company Has to Gain From Reported Uber Investment

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How Google Decides Which Knowledge Graph Images to Show

How Google May Decide Upon knowledge Graph Images

Google has been showing Knowledge panels in response to queries when Google recognizes an entity within a query, and Google has collected enough information about that entity for it to display a knowledge panel about the entity. I’ve written about these knowledge panels before in the posts, How Google Decides What To Know In Knowledge Graph Results, and in Google’s Knowledge Cards.

I mentioned knowledge graph images in those, but not how entity images might be chosen to represent those entities those panels are about, especially when the entities are people.

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