Google Gets 2 New Patents

After finally getting its Voice Search patent last week, Google gets more good news: 2 more patent grants.

U.S. Patent 7031954 - "Enterprise Search"
Document retrieval system with access control
[full text]
Filed: September 10, 1997
Granted: April 18, 2006

The patent text describes the indexing of all documents across remote servers that pertain to a query. That index list is then served up to the user who made the query, based on the user's level of access privileges. Documents located on a level for which the user does not have access rights will not be shown in the file list. This synchronizes document availability and security across all parts of the storage system. The patent text makes many references to "corporate intranets" and the existence of security levels and a corresponding spectrum of user accounts. It looks like this patent was filed to protect developments in the Google Enterprise search division.


U.S. Patent 7031961 - "Social Bookmarking"
System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository
[full text]
Filed: December 4, 2000
Granted: April 18, 2006

The patent text describes a social bookmarking system like del.icio.us -- but with some more developed capabilities. In addition to storing bookmarks for indivdual users and collecting data for the entire population of users, the system aims to "learn" from user clickstreams and bookmarking activity. The information gathered from this monitoring enables the system to better understand the quality of bookmarked information and then serve that up as new bookmark suggestions. The text also describes the value in the "distillation" of all of the web's content by the collection of users, essentially calling this a human-driven information filter. One implementation of the system described might be to influence the relevancy of heavily bookmarked items to related search queries (so they'd climb the SERPs).