Google and Media Searching
October 15, 2008
Google seems to be serious about media searching. How do I know? Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, received US7,437,351 “Method for Searching Media” on October 14, 2008. What makes this invention interesting is that Mr. Page did not have any co inventors. The Google founders may be thinking about green energy and their real estate development at Moffett Field, but Mr. Page takes time to do real Googley work. Here’s the abstract from the patent document which was filed in 2003:
The present invention is directed to a computer-implemented method and apparatus for searching in response to Internet-based search queries using a search engine and an electronic database. According to one example embodiment of the present invention, data sets representing published items are input, for example, scanned-in or sent electronically, and stored in a searchable database. Each data set includes text from at least one published item. Responsive to the search query, a search engine searches for and identifies relevant Web pages and data sets representing published items and, in a more specific embodiment, ranked characterizations are returned for the relevant web pages and published items. An electronic path can be provided with the published item for accessing further information about the published item. In one embodiment, the electronic path is a hyperlink from a characterization of a relevant published item to a more complete electronic representation of the relevant published item. Publishers provide authorization to display copyrighted materials through a permission protocol.
You can obtain the complete document from the USPTO.gov Web site. My take on this invention is that it is plumbing to allow Google to operate on and manipulate binary objects so more sophisticated and newer methods can be used to unlock media files; for example, the voice to text system to permit searching within the sound in a video file. Sergey Brin invented that technology for Google, by the way. One final comment to Cyrus, the Googler who is somewhat unfamiliar with the conventions of Google patent documents. “This patent document has the same lousy diagrams that Google includes in most of its filings. Check it out if you have time between emails, SMS messages, and other Google sales activities. Try Google’s own patent service, but it is not as useful as some for-fee services, however.”
Stephen Arnold, October 15, 2008
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3 Responses to “Google and Media Searching”
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Are you sure Sergey invented the voice-to-text technology? It’s just that there are some very big players in that field and they’re pretty good.
CJ
No, I’m not sure of anything. There’s a Google patent for voice search (US7027987) and Sergey Brin is listed as an inventor. That’s the extent of my knowledge. Truth, accuracy–no clue.
Stephen Arnold, October
My bet would be on Nuance delivering that for them, based on the fact that Google already use their OCR technology, but having said that Google hired some top speech people from Nuance in 2005. Also, Nuance contributed to speech recognition used in Android too.
Nuance are brilliant, it would make sense for them to use them rather than reinvent the wheel.