Personalized Network Searching
September 7, 2008
On September 4, 2008, the USPTO granted US2008/0215553 to Google. The invention is “personalized network searching”. The inventors are Gregory Badros and Stephen Lawrence. In this short post, I want to provide a glimpse of the background of the inventors and then briefly comment on the invention. With the availability of Chrome, Google’s browser, “network searching” becomes more important to me. You, of course, may be indifferent to Google’s “inventions”, but I find them useful windows through which to observe Google engineering at work. A patent does not mean that the inveniton will be used or that it will work, but patents can provide some information about a firm that keeps its lips zipped.
First, who is Stephen Lawrence? He has a low profile, which is not surprising. The biography available on the Queesnland University of Toronto provides some information. You can read the biography here. Some information from that write up suggests that he is a top notch thinker. After getting his PhD, he went to work at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. He then jumped to Google, where he seems to still work as a Senior Staff Research Scientist. Among the projects on which he has worked at Google are the desktop search application.
Greg Badros is former InfoSpace engineer. He is a graduated of teh University of Washington and a PhD in computer science and engineering. A Duke Unviersity undergraduate, he graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1995. He signed on at Google in 2003. Among his projects were Gmail, calendar, and AdSense. He has received two Google Founders’ Awards and two Executive Management Group awards. You can pick up biographical details here.
These two fellows teamed up in 2003 to work on “personalized network searching.” The patent application resulted in the granting of US2008/0215553 in September 2008.
The abstract for the invention is:
Personalized network searching, in which a search query is received from a user, and a request is received to personalize (a search result. Responsive to the search query and the request to personalize the search result, a personalized search result is generated by searching a personalized search object. Responsive to the search query, a general search result is generated by searching the general search object. The personalized search result and the general search result are provided to – a client device, an advertisement is selected based at least in part upon the personalized search object, and the advertisement, the personalized search result, &d the general search result are displayed.
My reading of this document is that Google uses the user’s bookmarks, search history, annotations, and the query to determine what the user seeks. The results may be enhanced with a symbol to add information for the user. Users with similar interests could be woven into a community. Users may excitly provide Google with bookmarks, but the invention can pull these items and others from the user’s computing device. The patent document provides a number of examples of how this invention might be used, ranging from pushing information to the user to performing collaborative work. One feature is that if a user doesn’t use bookmarks, the system will monitor what the user does and generate bookmarks based on those actions and data available to the system. The claims include personalization of advertising, information, and interface.
For me the key point is that the membrane or boundary between the user’s personal computer and its data and Google is opened. Whether this makes the user’s computer part of the broader Google computing environment or not depends on how you interpret the language of the patent document. You may find reading the 14 page document interesting. I did. A copy is available from the USPTO here. My view is that Chrome makes this type of Google private network connection easier for the GOOG to control and instrument. I can think of some interesting uses of this technology for intelligence and enterprise applications. What are your thoughts?
Stephen Arnold, September 8, 2008
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