Yesterday I noticed a very large number of new patents listed in the USPTO assignment records for Google from IBM, and made note of them in a post, Google Acquires Over 1,000 IBM Patents in July. I didn’t expect or anticipate the interest that my post would stir up, though I probably should have, [...] [...]
Google was recently involved in a bidding war with Apple, Microsoft, and others over more than 6,000 patent filings from Nortel. It was a war that the search giant lost when a group comprised of Apple, Microsoft, Research in Motion, Ericsson, Sony, and EMC joined together to bid $4.5 billion in cash. Google oddly [...] [...]
Search engine optimization grows and changes much as the Web itself does. With the recent addition of Google Plus to the services that Google offers, and this year’s introduction of the Big Panda updates, one of the growing areas of SEO involves seeing how Google and other search engines might incorporate more user information [...] [...]
Historically, search engines have ranked web pages in search results based upon a combination of an information retrieval (IR) score based upon a matching of terms in a query to terms in a document, as well as a linked based score that calculates the quality and quantity of links pointing to a page, based [...] [...]
I’ve been doing research on Google’s social Q&A sites codenamed Confucius which are in more than 68 countries and multiple languages, but little known in the US. What I’ve seen includes some tantalizing hints about Google Plus, a description of how content submitted to Google Plus might be ranked in Google Web search, and [...] [...]
Google filed for a patent in 2005 that could have transformed how we think about and use links, such as letting webmasters decide how much PageRank a link might pass along, or applying machine readable labels to links, indicating that some links might lead to “offensive” content (“offensive=very”) or “funny” information (“funny=somewhat”), or where [...] [...]
One of the challenges that face search engines is how to rank content found on sites that rely upon users to create that content, often referred to as User Generated Content or UGC. Towards the end of 2009, I wrote a post about a Yahoo patent that described some of the things they might [...] [...]
Sometime soon I’m planning to record some new webmaster videos. I created a Google Moderator page where you can post video suggestions and vote topics up and down. Instead of short 1-2 minute video answers to quick questions, I’d like to try something new this time. I’d like to move toward making tutorials about how [...]
They named the project Phil, because it sounded friendly. (For those who required an acronym, they had one handy: Probabilistic Hierarchical Inferential Learner.) That was bad news for a Google Engineer named Phil who kept getting emails about the system. He begged Harik to change the name, but Phil it was. – Steven Levy, [...] [...]
Given the Panda Updates from Google, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking at how search engines might use automated programs to classify webpages, and how they use those classifications. If you’re a web publisher, it’s the kind of thing that you might be interested in as well. If you display ads, [...] [...]