Hello and welcome to this year's edition of patents of interest from the fine folks at Google. This isn't actually ALL of them, believe it or not, but the ones I found interesting enough to share in my SEO Geeks Newsletter.

Another element to consider are the dates. Some patents may have been filed in 2010 or 2011 while others as far back as 2004. This means looking in aggregate may not tell the picture as it first seems. That being said, it is interesting (or telling?) that there was again a lot of awards for;

• Geo-local
• Semantic / NLP
• Query analysis

The more telling area would be 'social'. With the rise of social in 2007/8 it makes sense that over the next while there will be more and more social related patents being awarded. What we didn't see a lot of, that may also be telling, are patent awards related to;

• Temporal
• Links
• Mobile

There are plenty of reasons for that, but it's not something we'll get into today. This post is going to be friggen long enough as it is. So let's get on with it shall we?

The Year in Search Patents from Google

Now, before we get rolling, it is always important to note that this journey is more about getting a sense of where search engineers have been spending their time. What actually makes it into the algo ultimately becomes a benefit v cost exercise. Please do note the 'SEO Magic Bullet' post. That'll help keep you straight.

Geo-local

• Secondary map in digital mapping system
• Scoring local search results based on location prominence
• Methods and Systems for Endorsing Local Search Results
• Local item extraction
• Business listing search
• Business listing search (II)
• Interpreting local search queries
• Generating human-centric directions in mapping systems
• Entity display priority in a distributed geographic information system
• Machine-readable representation of geographic information
• Interpreting local search queries
• Presentation of local results
• Presentation of Local Results (II)
• Dynamic determination of location-identifying search phrases
• Location in search queries
• Trusted Maps: Updating Map Locations Using Trust-Based Social Graphs
• Using geographic data to identify correlated geographic synonyms
• Scoring local search results based on location prominence
• Dynamic determination of location-identifying search phrases
• Geocoding personal information
• Displaying search results based on density
• Using boundaries associated with a map view for business location searching
  
  

Semantic and NLP

• Selectively deleting clusters of conceptually related words from a generative model for text
• Document based synonym generation
• Translating a search query into multiple languages
• Word detection
• Identifying a synonym with N-gram agreement for a query phrase
• Methods and systems for identifying paraphrases from an index of information items and associated sentence fragments
• Translating a search query into multiple languages
• Language Model Selection for Speech-to-Text Conversion
• Determining a Meaning of a Knowledge Item Using Document Based Information
• Phrase based snippet generation
• Method and apparatus for learning a probabilistic generative model for text
• Segmenting words using scaled probabilities
• Document ranking based on semantic distance between terms in a document
• Dictionary Word and Phrase Determination
  
  

Social

• Multi-community content sharing in online social networks
• Propagating promotional information on a social network
• Dynamically naming communities within online social networks
• Ranking social network objects
• Social Search Engine
• Social Messaging User Interface
• Social Interaction Hub
• Initiating communications with web page visitors and known contacts
• Methods and systems for rating associated members in a social network
• Methods and systems for the display and navigation of a social network
• Organizing social activity information on a site
• Trusted Maps: Updating Map Locations Using Trust-Based Social Graphs
• Social media enabled advertising
• Display and navigation of a social network
  
  

Query Analysis

• Query revision using known highly-ranked queries
• Contextual display of query refinements
• Methods and systems for adjusting a scoring measure based on query breadth
• Query Optimization
• Generating query suggestions using contextual information
• Contextual Query Revision
• Identifying related queries
• Systems and methods for determining query similarity by query distribution comparison
• Query Language Identification
• Systems and methods for detecting commercial queries
• Document scoring based on query analysis
• Search queries improved based on query semantic information
  
  

Behavioural

• Methods and apparatus for employing usage statistics in document retrieval
• Systems and media for utilizing electronic document usage information with search engines
• Personalized network searching
• Personailized Network Searching (II)
• Inferring user interests

Duplicate Content

• Document near-duplicate detection
• Systems and methods for identifying similar documents
• Representative document selection for sets of duplicate documents in a web crawler system
• Similarity-based searching
• Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files
• Similarity-based searching (II)
• Similarity-based searching (III)
• Demotion of repetitive search results
  
  

Named Entities

• Content Author Badges
• Query rewriting with entity detection
• Agent Rank
• Agent Rank (II)
• Query rewriting with entity detection
• Delegating authority to evaluate content
  
  

Verticals/Universal; Video, News, Images, Blogs, Forums, Ecommerce

• Ranking video articles
• Method and system for finding and aggregating reviews for a product
• Ranking of images and image labels
• Visual presentation of video recommendations
• Identifying media content in queries
• Unified search interface
• Selecting high quality text within identified reviews for display in review snippets
• Method and system for mining image searches to associate images with concepts
• Method and apparatus for automatically annotating images
• Blocking of Unlicensed Audio Content in Video Files on a Video Hosting Website
• Using Viewing Signals In Targeted Video Advertising
• Television Related Searching
• Method and system for approving documents based on image similarity
  
  

Recommendation engine

• Performing multiple related searches
• Web search refinement
• Dynamic query suggestion
• Category suggestions relating to a search
• Method and system for URL autocompletion using ranked results
• Systems and methods for providing search query refinements

Temporal

• Document scoring based on inception date
• Handling document revision history information in the presence of a multi-user permissions model
• Document scoring based on doncument content update

Categorization

• Presentation of search results with common subject matters
• Providing relevance-ordered categories of information
• Keywords associated with document categories
• Method and system for providing targeted documents based on concepts automatically identified therein
  

Spam

• Systems and methods for detecting click spam
• Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system
• Detecting and rejecting annoying documents
• Abuse-resistant method of registering user accounts with an online service

Mobile

• Blending Mobile Results
• Local search and mapping for mobile devices
• Blending mobile search results
• Mobile image-based information retrieval system
• Blending Mobile Search Results

Comments

• Presenting comments from various sources
• Spreading comments to other documents
• Objective and subjective ranking of comments

Question / Answer

• Conversational question and answer
• Providing question and answer services
• Seeking answers to questions

Semantic markup

• Search over structured data

Links

• Document scoring based on link based criteria

Page segmentation

• Systems and methods for analyzing boilerplate
• Identifying relevant portions of a document

This and That...

These are the somewhat less specific areas which are the nuts and bolts of a search system. While not as targeted as the above categories, they do make some good reading. Especially for those just getting into the world of IR. Also, in the 'ranking methods' section, you'll find some that were listed above. In some cases it makes sense to see things from both perspectives.

Ranking methods

• Objective and subjective ranking of comments
• Generic online ranking system and method suitable for syndication
• Ranking custom search results
• Methods and Systems for Adjusting a Scoring Measure Based on Query Breadth
• Document ranking using word relationships
• Online ranking metric
• Methods and systems for improving a search ranking using related queries
• Improving a search ranking using population information
• Demotion of repetitive search results
• Document scoring based on query analysis
• Methods and systems for adjusting a scoring measure based on query breadth
• Document ranking based on semantic distance between terms in a document
• Framework for evaluating web search scoring functions

Systemic

• Parallel processing of data
• Sitemap generation where last modified time is not available to a network crawler
• Identification of web sites that contain session identifiers
• Content retrieval from sites that use session identifiers
• Sharing user distributed search results
• System and method for managing multiple domain names for a website in a website indexing system
• Resource search operations
• Presenting real time search results
• Systems and methods for providing search results
• Method and apparatus for output of search results
• Scaling machine learning using approximate counting
• System and method for enabling website owners to manage crawl rate in a website indexing system
• Scheduler for search engine crawler
• Counting unique search results

Other

• Web page experiments with fragmented section variations
• Method, system, and graphical user interface for alerting a computer user to new results for a prior search
• Scalable user clustering based on set similarity
• In-context searching
• Domain-specific sentiment classification
• Information search system with real-time feedback
• Propagating Information Among Web Pages
• Deriving and using document and site quality signals from search query streams

Digging a little deeper

While I was collecting the offerings from this year I thought it might be equally interesting (to me geeks of course) to look at the last 3 years of round-ups and put them ALL into one page. It is staggering the amount of information we have here folks. Look at the geo-local section alone; reading ALL of those would be one heck of an undertaking.

Anyway, here's the last two years worth of round-ups;

• Google Patents 2010
• Google Patents 2009

I hope at least a few folks find these useful... My advice is to pick one area to start and begin reading through. Those skilled in the art will find GREAT things for future proofing your SEO... 'nuff said.

Also, be sure to see the rest of the series including Microsoft Patents 2011 and Yahoo Patents 2011 (coming over the next couple days).

Happy Holidays... and have a great 2012!!

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