SEO Geeks Picks 09; Google Search Patents

Next up in our ‘Top Picks’ for 2009', (Geek style) is the world of patents. If there is one area that continues to heat up is the behavioural data world. From all of the Big 3(?) we noticed a definite trend to seeing more on implicit/explicit user feedback.

This one is for the patents coming from the folks at Google… Beyond the behavioural stuff, we also noticed an up-tick in patents relating to Geo-local and Universal search elements. Which of course does seem to be much of what Google is going after these days (personal, geo, universal).

Who knew watching patents could foretell the future?

Google Search Patents from 2009

Implicit/ Explicit

	Collaborative Search Results Methods and systems for personalized network searching Detecting anomalies Domain-Specific Sentiment Classification Rank-adjusted content items Annotating webpage content (Site Wiki?)

Geo-local

	Improving a search ranking using location awareness Ordering of search results based on language and/or country of search results Geo-coding Multi-Feature Addresses System and method for identifying bounds of a geographical area System and method for identifying geographical areas that significantly overlap a map view Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using location awareness

Universal Search

	Interface for a universal search Distinguishing Accessories from Products for ranking search results Image-based search engine for mobile phones with camera Methods and apparatus for clustering news content Systems and methods for improving the ranking of news articles Methods and systems for identifying an image as a representative image for an article Media object query submission and response Improving the ranking of news articles Enhanced search results Identifying clusters of similar reviews and displaying representative reviews from multiple clusters

Query Analysis

	Query identification and association Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using related queries Determining a known character string equivalent to a query string Integration of multiple query revision models Providing Content Using Stored Query Information (Ad Targeting) Estimating confidence for query revision models

Semantic Analysis

	Determining query term synonyms within query context Domain Dictionary Creation (NLP for non-roman character sets) Word decompounder Integrating external related phrase information into a phrase based indexing IR system Semantic unit recognition Phrase-based generation of document descriptions Segmenting words using scaled probabilities      Inferring search category synonyms from user logs

Temporal

	Temporal ranking scheme for desktop searching

Trust Authority

	Search result ranking based on trust

Links

	Determining document subject by using title and anchor text of related documents

Recommendation Engine

	Category suggestions relating to a search

Infrastructure

	Multiple index based information retrieval system Cross-Language Search Systems and methods of synchronizing indexes

Named Entities (navigational search)

	Query rewriting with entity detection

Spam

	Zero-minute virus and spam detection Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system

Other

	Voice Recognition Grammar Selection Based on Context Search filtering RATING RATERS – spam busting for Reviewers Customization of search results for search queries received from third party sites Generating specialized search results in response to patterned queries Method and Apparatus to Incorporate Automatic Face Recognition in Digital Image Collections Duplicate document detection in a web crawler system Preferential ranking of code search results

It is interesting to note that Google is easily the least active of the Big 3 as far as patents go. Of course this is a good thing for geeks as it makes ‘Google Watching’ a bit easier during the year. Huzzah for that…

I hope you take the time to check out a few of these or bookmark them for your next round of testing. In the next edition (later today, grab the Feed) we’ll be posting the Microsoft and Yahoo Patents from 2009. Remember, there are no magic bullets; we seek to understand the mindset of engineers. Thus all search patents are worth knowing… not just Google… M’kay?

Stay Tuned

Top Picks 09 Series;

Top SEO posts from 2009
Google Search Patents 2009
Yahoo Search Patents
Microsoft Search Patents 2009
SEO News 2009
Local, Social and Tools 09
SEO Videos 09

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