Over on his site Om finds a new patent in Yahoo’s arsenal that might have implications along the lines of the supposedly settled Yahoo/Google lawsuit. The patent Om found covers “displaying paid and unpaid listings on the results page after a search term is input.”
The settlement gave Google access to a whole bunch of Yahoo patents, but I am not sure if this one – US Patent # 6,704,727 – was part of the deal. I have already sent emails to the PR folks at these two fine companies, and probably would know more on Monday.
Looks like a patent on pay-for-inclusion in search results,
rather than text ads separate from the results.
Just went through the patent and at the face of it, it looks like that the interesting differentiation is the “maintaining a master set of search terms in the database” this to me is very close to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool.
So possibly this patent does not constitute a threat to Google or any other search player because Google apparently does not use a masterdatabase of search terms – it seems in their technology search terms are read dynamically (although they might be using master database to understand the spelling variation, but that database most probably goes to create an algorithm to predict spelling variants).
It would be interesting to watch how the legalities of this battle play out?
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