And last, but never least, in our patent round up of the Big 3 (though it will likely be 2 now with Yahoo going the way of the Dodo) is of course; Google.

As we've seen with the others, there is a distinct increase in the geo-local areas. While patents tend to be older than a year (from time of filing) it is still interesting to see this. We all know, or should, that local is the in-thing over the last few years. Is it a coincidence that the patent filing mimic this? Probably not.

Also interesting and likely telling were the number of systemic related patents. Why telling? Because 2010 for Google was all about Caffeine and other infrastructure upgrades.

Here's the list;

Geo-local

• Markup language for interactive geographic information system
• Refining location estimates and reverse geo-coding based on a user profile
• Searching structured geographical data
• Classification of ambiguous geographic references
• Geocoding Personal Information
• Indexing documents according to geo-graphic relevance
• Indexing documents according to geographical relevance
• Local item extraction
• Geographic coding for location search queries
• Scoring local search results based on location prominence
• Methods and systems for endorsing local search results
• Generating structured information
• Using boundaries associated with a map view for business location searching
• System for automatically integrating a digital map system
• Enhanced Search Results (Maps)
• Displaying images according to environmental conditions
• System for automatically integrating a digital map system
• Map user interface

Behavioural

• Systems and methods for generating multiple implicit search queries
• Personalization of placed content ordering in search results
• Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data
• Variable personalization of search results in a search engine
• Document ranking based on semantic distance between terms in a document
• Providing Digital Content Based On Expected User Behavior
• Systems and methods for providing searchable prior history
• Scalable user clustering based on set similarity
• Systems and methods for providing subscription-based personalization
• Systems and methods for demoting personalized search results based on personal information
• System and method for modulating search relevancy using pointer activity monitoring

Semantic and NLP

• Transliteration for query expansion
• Systems and methods for inferring concepts for association with content
• Machine Learning for Transliteration
• Meaning-based advertising and document relevance determination
• Phrase-based detection of duplicate documents in an information retrieval system
• Improving Text Segmentation
• Finding text on a web page
  
  

Duplicate Content

• System for automatically managing duplicate documents when crawling dynamic documents
• Information retrieval system for archiving multiple document versions
• Document near-duplicate detection
• Phrase based detection of duplicate documents in an informational retrieval system
• Detecting query-specific duplicate documents

Named Entities

• Associating an Entity with a Category
• Detecting Entities and New Words
• Query-independent entity importance in books
  
  

Query Analysis

• Method and system for processing queries initiated by users of mobile devices
• Automatic completion of fragments of text
• Idenfiying query aspects
• Anticipated query generation and processing in a search engine
• Simplifying query terms with transliteration
  
  

Links

• Method and system for dynamically generating search links embedded in content
• Determining quality of linked documents
• Systems and methods for using anchor text as parallel corpora for cross-language information retrieval
• Identifying the unifying subject of a set of facts
• Enhanced document browsing with automatically generated links to relevant information
  
  

Temporal

• Time-multiplexing documents based on preferences or relatedness
• Systems and methods for determining document freshness
• System and method for displaying both time information search results and internet search results
  
  

Categorization

• Systems and methods for category-based search
• System and method for determining a composite score for categorized search results
• Search query categorization for business listing search
  
  

Page Segmentation

• Document segmentation based on visual gaps
• Methods and systems for improving text segmentation
• Segmenting Printed Media Pages Into Articles

Social

• Open profile content identification
• Systems and methods for managing multiple user accounts
• Generating user profiles
  
  

Ranking methods

• Methods and systems for output of search results
• Systems and methods for ranking implicit search results
  
  

Verticals; Video, News, Blogs, Forums

• Interactive financial charting and related news correlation
• Indexing and retrieval of blogs
• Time-Marked Hyperlinking to Video Content
• System and Method for Translating Timed Text in Web Video
• Video-related recommendations using link structure
  
  

Recommendation engine

Generating query suggestions using contextual information

Semantic markup

System and method for updating facts in a fact repository (meta data)

URLs

Resource locator suggestions from input character sequence

Deep Web

Facilitating searches through content which is accessible through web-based forms

Systemic

• Multiple index based information retrieval system
• Methods and systems for detecting and extracting information
• Systems and methods for providing a graphical display of search activity
• Index updating using segment swapping
• Providing Search Results
• Methods and systems for information capture and retrieval
• Scheduler for search engine crawler
• Accelerated large scale optimization
• Identifying inadequate search content
• Indexing server architecture using tiered and sharded phrase posting lists
• Large scale machine learning systems and methods
• Limiting requests by web crawlers to a web host
• Methods and systems for compressing indices
• Document search engine including highlighting of confident results
• Predictive Searching and Associated Cache Management
• Alternate methods of displaying search results

Other

• Providing Posts to Discussion Threads in Response to a Search Query
• Content identification expansion
• Custom search index
• Mobile image-based information retrieval system
• Detecting spam related and biased contexts for programmable search engines
• Automatic generation of rewrite rules for URLs

And there we have it... I may spend a little time this week and get together the lists from the previous two years and see what the roadmap looks like in aggregate. Can we find some trends? Not sure. It will be an interestinig exercise.

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