Google: Another Cool Patent
September 19, 2008
Anna Patterson left Google to found Cuil, the much-maligned search engine. You can refresh your memory about Cuil here. I learned on September 16, 2008, that the USPTO granted 7,426,507 to Google. Invented by Dr. Patterson, “Automatic Taxonomy Generation in Search Results Using Phrases” discloses:
An information retrieval system uses phrases to index, retrieve, organize and describe documents. Phrases are identified that predict the presence of other phrases in documents. Documents are the indexed according to their included phrases. Related phrases and phrase extensions are also identified. Phrases in a query are identified and used to retrieve and rank documents. Phrases are also used to cluster documents in the search results, create document descriptions, and eliminate duplicate documents from the search results, and from the index.
Now that Dr. Patterson has left Google, it appears to me that she has conveyed some of her technical insights to Google. Nothing unusual in that in the Googleplex. Would Cuil.com have benefited from this invention? If you have any thoughts on this matter, please, post them.
Stephen Arnold, September 18, 2008
Comments
2 Responses to “Google: Another Cool Patent”
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Your excerpt from the patent makes it sounds like phrase extraction and indexing would now be protected by this patent. This can’t really be the case, can it? I’m thinking Cluuz.com and its patent-pending phrase/entity extraction and use in search result pages.
Could you please shed some more light on this?
Thank you.
Otis Gospodnetic
The excerpt is the abstract from the invention. I have a number of thoughts about this invention, but these will appear in one of my for fee reports, not this free Web log which is a diary of sorts. If we meet face to face, we may be able to talk about the invention informally. In the interim, download the document and do some comparative searches. N gram methods work well for this type of research.
Stephen Arnold, September 22, 2008