Google and Content Processing
October 12, 2009
I find the buzz about Google’s upgrades to its existing services and the chatter about Google Books interesting but not substantive. My interest is hooked when Google provides a glimpse of what its researchers are investigating. I had a conversation last week that pivoted on the question, “Why would anyone care what a researcher or graduate students working with Google do?” The question is a good one and it illustrates how angle of view determines what is or what is not important. The media find Google Books fascinating. The Web log authors focus on incremental jumps in Google’s publicly accessible functions. I look for deeper, tectonic clues about this trans-national, next generation company. I sometimes get lonely out on my frontier of research and analysis, but, as I said, perspective is important.
That’s why I want to highlighting a dense, turgid, and opaque patent application with the fetching title “Method and System for Processing Published Content on the Internet”. The document was published on October 8, 2009, but the ever efficient USPTO. The application was filed on June 9, 2009, but its technology drags like an earthworm through a number of previous Google filings in 2004 and more recent disclosures such as the control panel for a content owner’s administering of a distribution and charge back for content. As an isolated invention, the application is little more than a different charge at the well understood world of RSS feeds. The problem Google’s application resolves is inserting ads into RSS content without creating “unintended alerts”. When one puts the invention is a broader context, the system and method of the invention is more flexible and has a number of interesting applications. These are revealed in the claims section of the patent application.
Keep in mind that I am not a legal eagle. I am an addled goose. Nevertheless, what I found suggestive is that the system and method hooks into my analysis of Google’s semantic functions, its data management systems, and, of course, the guts of the Google computational platform itself for scale, performance, and access to other Google services. In short, this is a nifty little invention. The component that caught my attention is the controls made available to publishers. The idea is that a person with a Web log can “steer” or “control” some of the Google functions. The notion of an “augmented” feed in the context of advertising speaks to me of Google’s willingness to allow a content producer to use the Google system like a giant information facility. Everything is under one roof and the content producer can derive revenue by using this facility like a combination production, distribution, and monetization facility. In short, the invention builds out the “digital Gutenberg” aspect of the Google platform.
Here’s how Google explains this invention:
The invention is a method for processing content published on-line so as to identify each item in a unique manner. The invention includes software that receives and reads an RSS feed from a publisher. The software then identifies each item of content in the feed and creates a unique identifier for each item. Each item then has third party content or advertisements associated with the item based on the unique identifier. The entire feed is then stored and, when appropriate, updated. The publisher then receives the augmented feed which contains permanent associations between the third party advertising content and the items in the feed so that as the feed is modified or extended, the permanent relationships between the third party content and previously existing feed items are retained and readers of the publisher’s feed do not receive a false indication of new content each time the third party advertising content is rotated on an item.
The claims wander into the notion of a unique identifier for content objects, item augmentation, and other administrative operations that have considerable utility when applied at scale within the context of other Google services such as the programmable search engine. This is a lot more interesting than a tweak to an existing Google service. Plumbing is a foundation, but it is important in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, October 12, 2009
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