trillianjedi - 9:13 am on Apr 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

Corporations usually own the patents of the employees.

The law is essentially the same in the UK, if on the employers time etc.

But the corporation would file the patent or trademark in this situation.

It's not clear here as it's been filed in their personal names. There is no reference to Google at all.

This thread seems to be discussing this as some new fangled algo weighting and SERPS ranking created by google, owned by google and used by google.

While there are elements of the patent application which would fit in with the way Google Search behaves, I'm not actually convinced it's anything to do with Google Inc.

There also seem to be references in the thread to this being another "April 1st" joke, but the document I'm looking at was filed over a year ago, in December 2003.

Are we all looking at the same thing? What am I missing?

TJ