This past Spring (March 2005), the Internet, SEO firms and wannabes, and webmaster forums went bizzerk of the Google Patent. Much speculation has been raised about what the patent said, what it meant for webmasters, the interpretations of the verbiage, and more. So here's a thought - read it for yourself, in its entirety, not in snippets taken out of context, and not someone else's interpretation. This is directly from the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office EDIT - you will have to visit that link as the DP max characters for a thread is 20000 and the patent is about 89000
Do also note that the date of filing for that patent was December 2003 (scroll down a bit to find that information).
Yes, filed in December 2003, made "public" March 31 2005, and chickens begain screaming the sky is falling on April 01, 2005 ....
And the sky actually started falling 9/22/2005 or 10/17/2005, depending on the site(and if you were hit by Jagger). Unrelated, I'm sure... -- Derek
looks like a lot of hard work over a long period of time to get high rankings in Google. That patent looks like a "Lie detector" for websites. -RonMo
Indeed. And they obviously aren't including their best of algorithms in any public patent filing... -- Derek
I hate reading patents -- everything is a plurality of this and a plurality of that. I'm fairly certain that's the only place that word is ever used. Plus the patent is always kept as broad as possible and non-limiting; vague, if you will, in order to make certain no-one else can muscle in on it.
Patents - I know a little about - I own a couple and once worked for a multinational that made patent claims like people throw confetti at weddings. This may or may not help: Lots of times people patent ideas just to stop other people using them - we used to do it regularly. There would be a core issue or issues in each patent that we were serious about both using and protecting. There would then be plenty of throwaway stuff that was technically correct but we had no intention of using - we were just making the claim sufficiently broad to cover ourselves against our competitors changing our core ideas a little and stumbling on something even better than we had found. In most patents there is a core of serious stuff that's actually being used and there's other stuff that isn't.
Just don't use an IsNot operator... http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph...59".PGNR.&OS=DN/20040230959&RS=DN/20040230959 -- Derek
Is the patent approved even now? The point I was making is that the patent APPLICATION was FILED in December 2003 - what effect did that application have on what Google is or was doing between then and when the SEO world discovered it almost a year and a half later? or since? And they may never use it. I don't see any evidence they are using in now.
Minstrel, you are obviously an authority figure here, I wish I knew what you know. Your posts make good logical sense. Keep up the good work... -RonMo
No, ronmojohny, I'm not an authority. I just question everything I hear or read and try to do my own research. Really, this stuff is not rocket science. Just use a little logic and don't take anybody's opinion as fact, no matter how many forums you read it on or who says it. That includes me.
...and I just fell on my kees and asked my creator for 100 more years to get through the readings and to understand it and/or to find out what makes sense for us.
After Jagger there has been a lot of talk about google devaluing links which appear in the footer. I read the patent several times and no where it mentions the position of links on a webpage makes any difference. The rate at which a website acquires links is important but not where the links appear on the page. any thoughts........
This is merely a patent APPLICATION. This does not mean that anything in the patent will actually be granted. Based on the date that it was originally filed and when it showed up, they probably filed a provisional patent application first, which allows the patent to stay hidden for a minimum of one extra year. Also, for a technology company that is rapidly evolving, a patent application that is this old may have very little to do with what they are actually doing now. And, as someone else pointed out, don't assume that this is what they ever intended to practice. They may have simply filed in order to prevent others from blocking them in the future if they decide to use any ideas in the patent.
This is more interesting, anyways: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/google/Duplicates.pdf Details on an algorithm that Google is possibly using for detecting duplicate content... -- Derek
also keep in mind this is the public filing they did not choose to protect any of this under "trade secrets" This is what they want the public to know