| Internet Search Engine Patents |
Index of Select Patents on Internet Search Engines
CMGI/ AltaVista Search Engine Patents
CMGI -- an internet holding firm -- is the majority owner of Altavista. According to a November 13, 2000 CMGI press release (Altavista Wins Patents for Search Technology), AltaVista was recently awarded "four new patents for search technology." The press release goes on to describe the patented material:
"AltaVista Company has been awarded four new patents for search technology, bringing its total portfolio for proprietary systems to 38-more than any other search engine-along with numerous patents pending. The new patents reflect and protect the company's leadership in worldwide search technology..."The new patents are for proprietary search technology in the areas of identifying and eliminating duplicate pages in an index, ranking results by degrees of relevancy, data structures for searching and indexing, and 'spidering' techniques that crawl the World Wide Web and play a key role in building an index."
Here are several patents related to internet searching that are assigned to Altavista.
Alan Emtage, the creator of "Archie," an early web search utility, has questioned that validity of CMGI/ Altavista's patents on searching the internet. In a January 29, 2001 press release (referenced below), Emtage offered "assistance to anyone who is approached by CMGI in an effort to defend the patents in question" and declared:
"I'm amused, or more accurately, bemused, by the idea that such basic concepts underlying Internet search engines could be patented by a latecomer like CMGI/AltaVista. Archie, and other systems like Veronica (which indexed Gopher sites) had come up with and implemented these processes years before the Web even existed."
Also See:
Northern Light's "Custom Search Folder" Patent
A method and search apparatus for searching a database of records organizes results of the search into a set of most relevant categories enabling a user to obtain with a few mouse clicks only those records that are most relevant. In response to a search instruction from the user, the search apparatus searches the database, which can include Internet records and premium content records, to generate a search result list corresponding to a selected set of the records. The search apparatus processes the search result list to dynamically create a set of search result categories. Each search result category is associated with a subset of the records within the search result list having one or more common characteristics. The categories can be displayed as a plurality of folders on the user's display. For the foregoing categorization method and apparatus to work, each record within the database is classified according to various meta-data attributes (e.g., subject, type, source, and language characteristics). Because such a task is too much to do manually, substantially all of the records are automatically classified by a classification system into the proper categories. The classification system automatically determines the various meta-data attributes when such attributes are not editorially available from source.
According to a November 9, 1999 Northern Light press release (referenced below),
"The technology covered by the patent revolves around Norther Light's unique ability to automatically classify Web pages added to its database. While most search engines simply index such Web pages based on the text present in the document, the Northern Light patented classification technology uses algorithms to determine the subjects, type, source and language characteristics of the document and classifies the Web page accordingly."
The press release also declares "With this patent, it will be very difficult for competitors to deliver similar functionality."
Also see:
IP Learn's Search Engine Patents
A method and a system to teach a user a subject based on his questions. The system allows the user to control his learning process, and helps to fill in gaps of misunderstanding in the subject. In one embodiment, the system, including a database, presents study materials on the subject to the user. After working on the presented materials, the user enters his question into the system, which generates an answer to the question, and presents it to him. Then the system compares the question with one or more questions previously entered by the user to determine his understanding level in the subject. Based on the determination, the system may present to the user appropriate study materials. The user typically asks more than one question, and the process of answering his question by the system repeats.
A database-processing method and system for answering a natural-language question by a computer system with a database. In one embodiment, the system analyzes the grammatical structure of the question. In the analysis, the system scans the question to extract each word in the question; then based on a pre-defined context-free grammatical structure, the question is parsed into its grammatical components using one or more grammatically rules and the database. After parsing the question, the system transforms the components into one or more instructions, using one or more semantic rules and the database. The instructions, when executed, at least access data from the database for generating the answer to the natural-language question. In another embodiment, the system compares the natural-language question with questions stored in the database; each question in the database has its corresponding answer. If there is a match, the system retrieves the answer to the corresponding matched question and presents the answer to the student.
A Method and System to teach a user a subject based on his questions. The system allows the user to control his learning process, and helps to fill in gaps of misunderstanding in the subject. In one embodiment, the system, including a database, presents study materials on the subject to the user. After working on the presented materials, the user enters his question into the system, which generates an answer to the question, and presents it to him. Then the system compares the question with one or more questions previously entered by the user to determine his understanding level in the subject. Based on the determination, the system may present to the user appropriate study materials. The user typically asks more than one question, and the process of answering his question by the system repeats.
IP Learn filed suit against Ask Jeeves, Inc. on July 8, 1999. The following text is from a IP Learn
press release dated August 30, 1999.
IP Learn amended its original complaint against Ask Jeeves for infringing its patented natural-language question answering technologies, adding U.S. Patent Nos. 5,836,771 and 5,934,910. The latter patent on August 10, 1999. IP Learn values its patented technologies and will protect its patent portfolio against unauthorized use.
Also see:
Lycos "Spider" Patent
A method of constructing a catalog of files stored on a network comprised of a plurality of interconnected computers each having a plurality of files stored thereon. The method is accomplished by establishing a queue containing at least one address representative of a file stored on one of the interconnected computers, ranking each address in the queue according to the popularity of the file presented by the address, downloading the file corresponding to the address in the queue having the highest ranking, processing the downloaded file to generate certain information about the downloaded file for the catalog, adding to the queue any addresses found in the downloaded file, and determining the popularity of file represented by the addresses in the queue according to how often a file is referenced by a computer other than the computer on which the file is stored.
The Spider patent is assigned to Carnegie Mellon University. According to a 1998 Lycos press release (referenced below), "Portions of the Lycos spider technology are licensed on a perpetual, worldwide basis from Carnegie Mellon University." The Lycos press release claims that the '954 patent "recognizes the proprietary and unique nature of the Lycos spider technology and gives Lycos, Inc. exclusive rights to its spider search capability."
A 1998 "Electronic Commerce & Law" article (referenced below) noted that the Lycos Spider may not necessarily be limited to the Internet, and might extend to other forms of computer networks. Additionally, the article pointed to potential conflicts between Lycos and competing search engines that use spidering techniques.
"Excite implicitly referenced the Lycos patent in its May 22 filing with the SEC. In a summary of potential litigation issues, Excite stated that 'one of the Company's competitors was issued a patent with respect to certain aspects of its search technology. Although the Company has not received any correspondence with regard to this patent, this competitor has publicly stated that it intends to vigorously pursue entities it believes may infringe this patent.' "
Also see:
Infoseek's Distributed Search Patent
A document search method using a plurality of databases available from one or more servers using one or more search engines. For each database, the number of records is determined and reported, as well as frequency of search query term occurances or hits, together with identification of database records corresponding to the hits. Reports from a plurality of databases are furnished to a user terminal, a client, where client software computes a relevance score for each record based upon the number of records in the database, the number of records having at least one hit and the number of hits for each record. This local computation from uniform data allows all documents to be ranked consistently as if coming from a single database.
Here is a "Background Quote" from a September 9, 1997 Infoseek press release explaining the Distributed Search Patent:
(From Howard Turtle, Information Retrieval Researcher at West Group)
The Infoseek patent will allow a single search application to combine results from multiple document collections controlled by a heterogeneous set of search engines into a single ranked result. Current search engines do not provide enough information to allow results from different search engines to be combined effectively because scores obtained from different engines are incomparable. The mechanisms described in the patent will allow a single search application to collect the information necessary to provide a ranking that is equivalent to the ranking of the retrieved documents that would have been produced had all of the collections been available locally.The ability to produce an effective composite ranking is important for the distributed environments that are emerging with the growth of the Internet. In these environments, important document collections will be controlled by different search engines. Effective access to these distributed collections will require mechanisms very much like those described in the Infoseek patent.
Also see:
Netword's Keyword Patent
A universal electronic resource denotation, request and delivery system allows a user to locate information on a distributed computer system or network such as the Internet by knowing or guessing a short mnemonic alias of an electronic resource without the user having to know the physical or other location denotation such as the universal resource locator (URL) of the desired resource. The system hardware includes a client computer, a local server, a central registry server, a value added server, and a root server. The universal electronic resource denotation, request and delivery system supports a personal aliasing (nicknaming) feature, a universal resource accessing feature for finding location information such as URLs relating to a query term, a "see also" feature for including information about related documents or resources within the record of a resource, a feature for updating local servers and client machines by periodically deleting those records which have changed, a "try again" and "mirroring" feature for aiding a user in obtaining the resource under adverse hardware or software conditions, and an authentication and administration feature that allows a user to administer the aliases and related data which pertain to his/her resources.
Also see:
Additional Resources on Search Engine Patents
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Questions, comments and suggestions to Vergil Bushnell
vbushnell@cptech.org
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