Altavista taking over the world!

to the courts we go......

[English_Boy]

just a quick post....it seems that Altavista has been busy filing patents like they're going out of fashion...

[theregister.co.uk ]

amusing :-)

[seth_wilde]

This will be interesting to see how it plays out. Check out some of the things that have patents on. I think their used by every search engine out there.

indexing duplicate records of information of a database;

parsing, indexing and searching Web pages;

mapping an index of a database into an array of files;

ranking documents "in a hyperlinkedenvironment using connectivity and selective content analysis";

searching an index;

optimizing entries for searching an index;

and storing an integrated index of database records

Edited by: seth_wilde

[grnidone]

Don't know if I welcomed you before, but Welcome to the forums, English_Boy.

Lancaster...isn't that where Bowser (Junkyard Wars) is from?

-G

[Brett_Tabke]

Sorry I didn't see this post sooner English_Boy as I posted similar in the breaking news forum. I may splice mine onto the end of this one.

Most of Alta's patents are pretty old. If I understand it correctly, the 10 key ones on indexing and crawling were filed in late 94.

It is a very sticky situation. I know the register thinks different, but on this one, I'm pulling for Alta.

[English_Boy]

Hi grnidone - thanks for the welcome.

Good 'ol Bowser, star engineer! yes, I think he is from around these parts, although the programme is called Scrapyard Challenge across here before it migrated......excellent show though!

The Alta patent situation is a difficult one though, I don't know whether to compare it to our main telco BT : "we own the right to hyperlinks" affair....I think that they are trying very hard to establish their authority over the other engines and I can't see it progressing but.....

What it does show us is that the net will eventually become both a legal and moral minefield in the future - I'll only really worry when us seo's are affected by what we can and can't promote in terms of names and rights.

English_Boy :)
"lovin' every minute"

[Machiavelli]

Brett - you mention that a lot of the patents go back to the mid-nineties. However, a lot of the work on the indexing and querying of large scale file systems that was supposedly 'invented' around that time was in fact reinvented. A huge amount of important (well-documented) work exists from the 1970s from British (and probably American) universities. The academics in question found it quite bizarre when in the early/mid-nineties none of the new search-engines bothered to check if anyone had done similar work in the past. Until, of course, Google, but even they haven't implemented a great number of the ideas.

The old academics catch-phrase: "Everyone writes but no-one reads".