According to Fortune, the United States Patent Office awarded Google a Patent today for the technology behind Google Instant Search.
The granting of the patent means that other search engines won’t be able to provide the exact same type of search functionality as Google without licensing the technology from Google.
Fortune points out that the “the inclusion of prior queries submitted by a community of users, and may take into account a user profile.” could certainly be applied to social search like the collaboration that Facebook and Microsoft announced last month.
United States Patent 7836044 covers Anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine and was filed in June of 2004. It is described as:
“A search system monitors the input of a search query by a user. Before the user finishes entering the search query, the search system identifies and sends a portion of the query as a partial query to the search engine. Based on the partial query, the search engine creates a set of predicted queries. This process may take into account prior queries submitted by a community of users, and may take into account a user profile. The predicted queries are be sent back to the user for possible selection. The search system may also cache search results corresponding to one or more of the predicted queries in anticipation of the user selecting one of the predicted queries. The search engine may also return at least a portion of the search results corresponding to one or more of the predicted queries.”
Bing and Yahoo already were in great trouble due to the delay of innovation vs. Google Instant, but, at least, they had the hope to implement a similar service on their SE
but, if Google Instant and other innovative Google functions are patented, they’ll never can implement these functions on Bing and Yahoo, so, they’ll lose larger slices of their (already poor) SE market share and, someday, their SE will die or sold to Google for $1
Google Instant is a pain in the ass.
agree…instant sucks…makes me dizzy
google instant search is annoying
and on 2nd thought, wouldn’t this be prior art ?
http://www.psychicwhois.com
Yeah we can turn Instant Search off!
I don’t see this lasting long someone needs to invent just a better search engine I would say 50% of the time I can’t even find what I am looking for on Google.
I love google Instant Search. I think its FANTASTIC feature. I love the INSTANT SEARCH!
Thanks google for making this, I love it. 🙂
this is another instant domain service I often use: instantdomainsearch[dot]com
Instant or non Instant the #1 Bing (and Yahoo) problem is that Google makes lots of billion$ of profits every year while the Microsoft’s internet division loses half billion dollar per year
I swear I had seen the same technology elsewhere lom before google was using it. Can’t remember where though. I guess whoever it was should have patented it first. Sucks tho
can we really say this “invention” caters to an unmet need? it sounds like it’s actually an annoyance.
in reality, it doesn’t matter how weak these patents are. the uspto is still granting them.
and, because patents are taken seriously by so many people, no matter how weak they actually may be, if a company has enough of them, then, in the aggregate, they become something else: a selling point to investors, a bargaining chip in deal negotiations, a means to intimidate competitors via litigation, etc. patent quantity becomes more important than patent quality. great news if you’re the one collecting the reg fees.
will google become like microsoft (who were no doubt spurred on by ibm’s giant portfolio), churning out heaps of junk patents month after month with ne’er a reasonable return in sight?
it’s like a junk patent “arms” race. instead of an arms buildup it’s a patent buildup. war (litigation) may never come, the weapons (patents) may sit idly for decades, but there’s always the threat and the fear they create.
it is this environment of junk patent litigation threats and extortion via licensing that spurred someone in the industry to coin the infamous “patent troll” label.
i hope google doesn’t become like microsoft in this regard.
Google instant is a result of google’s invasive use of peoples searching patterns from their account data (gmail, adwords etc) without prior authorization. That is eerily Big Brother like.
Like it or not, the patent arms race is accelerating. At this point, it would be almost foolhardy not to protect an innovation like this with a patent; otherwise, Google’s competitors would jump at the chance to freely copy and otherwise exploit the invention. Not only that, but some such copier could obtain its own patent on Google’s technology, and then even sue Google itself for using it. With Microsoft and others being so aggressive on the patent enforcement front nowadays, obtaining a patent on every innovation — no matter how small — seems almost like the only responsible thing to do.
My name is Pal Sahota and the company name is Pal Systems Ltd. This is the same technology I invented it in 1989 and I called it search-as-you-type. Google are calling it under a few names including Search-as-you-Type (SayT) see below links.
http://code.google.com/p/search-as-you-type/
And their demo video on
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4/
The name of search-as-you-type was coined by me and used as our branded product and this can be clearly seen in the newspaper articles in my blog.
http://searchasyoutype.wordpress.com/about
There are also two videos made in 1991 which can also be seen from this blog.
Watching these videos it can be clearly seen that the data is accessed in the same way as shown in the above Google demo!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMB-vYrZ_ZE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFb87HRbKYQ
My product Autodispens used search-as-you-type everywhere and not just for accessing data. I believe that every type of “real time parsing algorithm” application is covered in this extensive program and this was done in DOS and on the very first PC’s. Am I going to have to pay royalties to use my own product done in 1989!
Until 2008 software in the UK was not patentable but was automatically covered under the copyright law. Is the US undermining UK copyright laws! There are dozens of concepts that I have developed based on this. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if there is any question you wish to ask me.
My name is Pal Sahota and I think that USPTO should be more accountable if they have made a mistake in issuing a patent because they have not done enough research especially in cases of ‘prior art’. Google recently got a patent for ‘instant’ search United States Patent 7836044. This is ‘prior art’ as this technology was pioneered by me in 1989. The full details are disclosed in my open letter below
http://wwwery.com/?p=10694