Altavista owns all major search engine patents.

[Brett_Tabke]

I've heard about this interesting story was coming out in Internet World. It is with CMGI's CEO, David Wetherell:

[internetworld.com...]

Here is a mini review of the interview by The Register:

[theregister.co.uk]

The gist of the story is that Alta owns 38 "major" patents covering spidering and indexing. It is rather gray area since many of the patents appear to over run territory of other patents owned by non other the the N ational S ecurity A gency of the United States. The N S-A is rumored to hold close to 100 patents covering a wide array of data mining, indexing, and interpretation on both text AND voice and languages skills (read: they can hook it up to a phone line and get a print out on-the-fly of all audio conversations in dozens different languages - re: e-c h elon).

[grnidone]

I heard about this a yesterday, but didn't know where the story was.

I think it is laughable. Let em try to sue because other search engines "violate" their patents. They will have to take on ~everybody~.

-G

[rencke]

"They [Altavista] were the first to spider and index the Web."
Wetherell hasn't been around long, has he?

[rcjordan]

>They [Altavista] were the first to spider and index the Web

That is true, so far as I can attest. We were all swapping reciprocals on our "other links" pages or submitting to various directories until Digital rolled out AV to show off their computer technology. Like the Unisys patent on .gifs, I expect AV has something here on the spidering aspect.

[rencke]

Hey c'mon, rc. AV started mid december 1995. By that time Lycos had been around since the spring, and Webcrawler for a year before that. "Heralded as the first Internet search engine, WebCrawler was created in early 1994 at the University of Washington." (from Excite press release)

[rcjordan]

As I said, so far as I can attest. I vaguely remember WebCrawler rolling out of University of Washington, but can't really peg Lycos for a start date. Though I don't doubt the authenticity of their respective dates, I can tell you that nothing happened much on the traffic front until AV came to town.