Interestingness is a great name for a ranking algorithm. It's what Yahoo's photo-based social network Flickr uses to show which images the community finds the most "interesting." Techdirt considers the impact that a couple of recent Yahoo...
The London Free Press is reporting on a case in a New York Federal District Court, Rescuecom v. Google, in which the Judge granted a motion to dismiss on Google's behalf. The case involved the use of trademarked terms as keywords, finding that...
Sean Daly, from Groklaw, interviewed Margaret Boribon of Copiepresse on September 28th about their copyright lawsuit against Google, which targets the use of Belgian news in Google News, and cached copies of those articles. He has posted their...
There were some interesting new patent applications this week from Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM, but nothing on the scale of the outpouring of intellectual property published and assigned to Google - I uncovered 15 new patent applications from the...
A few new patent filings from Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.com. Microsoft explores the use of self organizing maps in one patent filing, and shows how those could be used to make geographic searches more relevant. They also explore URL...
In Google Has the Largest Number of Dead and Old Pages, the Google Operating System Blog points to a video and some research from Google's Ziv Bar-Yossef that discusses how to grab a random sample of pages from major search engines and...
Yahoo patent filings include one detailing bidding for placement in paid search filed this past April, another that details a very interactive environment for watching television programming, a third describing a method of soliciting consumer...
There's a lot of blog coverage of a new patent from Google, System and method for supporting editorial opinion in the ranking of search results, which was originally filed with the US Patent Office in December of 2000. I'm seeing a lot of...
New Microsoft patent applications include one that attempts to identify web spam based upon signals within the content of a page, another looks at ways to search using pattern matching and relevance to answer specific questions, a third...
Google looks at search history and user behavior to rerank results and offer ecommerce recommendations, provides a way to rewrite navigation on web pages for users of a proxy system to access the web, and shows some of the inner workings of...
Adrian Graham, Picasa's Product Manager, made a post Tuesday morning on the Official Google Blog titled A better way to organize photos? in which he announced that the team at Neven Vision has now joined Google. His post tells us that Neven...
Sites in search results that rank highly while serving visitors only ads are the target of a number of papers by Microsoft, submitted to the SIGIR 2006 conference held last week. Michael Hickins wrote about them in Microsoft: Noise Improves...
This last week's patent applications involving search all seem to focus upon users of search engines, and finding ways to fulfill intentions behind searches. There are a couple from Stanford professor Louis Rosenberg and his company Outland...
There are a number of new patent applications from Yahoo, including one that utilizes concept networks to understand the intention behind a user's query; another describing an addition to a user interface that lets a searcher define the context...
Twelve Google patent applications where published this past week, including seven that focus upon geographical information and local search. (1) How good a match ads may be to the content on pages they are served upon through a program like...
Google files patents for shopping offline with online assistance, a secondary map in Google Maps, and an updated review aggregator. Yahoo adds a patent application for search results PPC advertising, and managing blog content. Microsoft looks...
In Pay-Per-Percentage vs. PPC, Shimon Sandler points out an interesting new paper from the folks at Microsoft Research - Pay-Per-Percentage of Impressions: An Advertising Method that is Highly Robust to Fraud (pdf) As Shimon notes, the idea is...
Microsoft's patent applications from the end of last week include ways for search engines to scan malicious web sites, clustering queries for more relevant searches, and extracting feature and formatting information from pages. IBM introduces a...
Google patents the Google File System, Microsoft claims a Functional Object Model for mobile devices, and Yahoo! (Overture) describes an autonotification process to inform advertisers of when a certain condition has been met concerning one of...
Four patent applications from Google describe fighting spam in emails, providing product review searches, moving large amounts of data, and autolinking. Yahoo matches, and raises with five patent filings. One on watching deletions to choose...
