Over on Yahoo’s Search Blog. Reiner Kraft is one serious search geek – more than 100 patents filed, apparently. From the interview:
Q: Aren’t you also finishing up your thesis?
A: Yes, it’s about domain specific search and is based on what I call iterative filtering meta search. The idea is to leverage the search engine infrastructures to create a filtering mechanism that automatically helps you get documents for a specialized information need. For instance, we built a buying guide finder that helps you to find just buying guides.
Q: If I hadn’t checked out your website , I’d think that everything you do revolves around relevancy and search! A lot of people at Yahoo! don’t know that you were part of a German band and that you’ve composed over 30 rock songs. How do define yourself first; composer or inventor?
A: (laughs) I just like to think about new ideas. So to me, it’s all the same thing. You create some music piece or you create some ideas or some algorithms to do something. It doesn’t have to be specific to search but ideas related to web technologies in a broad sense.
I just checked the USPTO for Reiner Kraft as an inventor, only 3 issued patents show up. None showing up in the “pending” section. He claims that 40 have been issued? Perhaps the rest are filed in a foregin country?
You need to do the patent search correctly:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=in%2Freiner+and+in%2Fkraft&d=ptxt
Thanks for the correction. For some reason the front page search of USPTO only brings back 3 patents, where as your query returns back 38.