A Smidgen of Dataspace Seeps from the Google
June 18, 2010
My favorite dataspace guru and his colleagues have nailed a US patent. I am speaking of Dr. Alon Halevy and his clutch of merry Googlers, Jayant Madhavan and David Ko. I know the azure chip set is excited about Google’s ability to pinpoint gaps in media coverage and methods for sucking the filling out of Wi Fi content. I am not. Nope, I keep my eye on the ball. In this case the system and method disclosed in US7,739,258, “Facilitating Searches through Content Which Is Accessible through Web-Based Forms.” These are not your mother’s social security forms. With some prior patents in the possession of sporty outfits like AT&T and Lucent, the Googlers have to tiptoe through the dataspace. I was going to write a lyric for Tiny Tim to sing: something along the line of “Tiptoe through the manifold with me.” But I won’t.
Here’s the crystal clear prose from the Google wizard and legal eagle team:
One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates crawling through web-based forms to gather information to facilitate subsequent searches through content which is accessible though the web-based forms. During operation, the system first obtains web-based forms to be searched. Note that the system can obtain these web-based forms from a number of sources. For example, the system can crawl through web sites to identify web-based forms, the system can receive manually provided web-based forms, or the system can find web-based forms through methods other than crawling. Next, the system creates database entries for the identified forms. This involves obtaining and storing metadata describing the identified forms into database entries and then storing these database entries in a form database to facilitate searches through content which is accessible through the identified forms. Note that this form database can include a web index and associated documents, which can be used to facilitate web search queries that return both ordinary documents and documents that result from form queries.
My view? Important.
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2010
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