lammert - 10:56 am on Aug 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

I imagine that those simple smilie faces could easily be added to the search results and people could rate how good the page is they accessed.

Actually Google did this already long time ago. If you use the Google toolbar, you'll see two faces. One is to "vote for this page" and the other "vote against this page".

The patent in question is not new, and was filed in December 2000. I don't know when the first toolbar was available from Google, but I think that we should see this patent in the context of the technology used in 2000, rather than the current anti spam measures or eval.google.com or the spam rater guide, which are from a later date. Every talk about web 2.0 is not relevant, this patent is six years old.

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Some searching at www.archive.org showed the following:

toolbar.google.com was introduced in February 2001, just two months after the filing of this patent. The vote buttons were first present in october 2002.
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