[Search-l] call to action....

[Fred Benenson]

I'm no lawyer, but It is my understanding that "the" google patents are
actually owned by Stanford. This is because Page & Brin were graduate
students working on their PhDs when they wrote that paper, and Stanford's
policy is to own the work that gets grants / funding. This means every time
Google wants to license most of the SE / PageRank stuff out, say to IBM
looking to index their internal network of documents or sites, Stanford gets
a slice of the pie.

There's also the possibility that Google has essentially obsoleted that
original technology, and if the patent is specific enough, Google's current
workings have no longer any ties to that paper, so we would only be getting
into trouble with Stanford.

Fred B

On 6/11/07, peter burden <peter.burden at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sami M wrote:
> >
> > Hi Folks,
> >
> > I've been following this list with interest. Internet search is my
> > passion and I'd been following it since 1998 starting with some
> > projects in grad school.
> >
> > I'd been working on a prototype of a large scale search engine the
> > last 2 years. This has been done mostly moonlighting nights and
> > weekends except for the last three months when I left my day job to
> > work on it fulltime. In summary… I've built a working implementation
> > of the original Google prototype according to their Stanford paper all
> > pushing approximately 60K lines of mostly C code. It is scalable on a
> > cluster of commodity linux boxes with some additional work. A single
> > server in this case can crawl, index, and serve 50M documents.
> >
>
> That's most interesting but I'd echo concerns about whether this would
> violate anybody's IPR, software
> patents etc. A quick check reveals 50 Google patents
>
> See
>
>
> http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=47&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=ptxt&s1=Google.ASNM.&OS=AN/Google&RS=AN/Google
>
> (comments about the length of the URL should be directed to the US
> Patent Office)
>
> I haven't yet fully analysed this and the diagrams seem to use an image
> format
> my browser doesn't know how to handle. About 20% of the patents look as if
> they may be relevant to an SE - some are clearly to do with extra bells
> and whistles
> on page ranking - others are more interesting, for example 6,658,423
> (december
> 2003) relates to detection of near-identical duplicates and looks very
> similar to
> the techniques I use for the same purpose in my crawler (Grr!)
>
> I'm not sure what other expressions of Google IPR we might transgress
> although,
> being secretive, they may not have patented some of their best ideas in
> the interests
> of secrecy.
>
> Incidentally if we do build on Sami's software I can offer a crawler
> that will do
> 50 pages/sec using two very modest domestic PCs (one crawling/parsing and
> one saving metadata in a MySQL database). It's written in C and is
> multi-threaded.
>
> > It is turning out to be a big task and now I am looking out for
> > options on what direction to take next. This is a call to action. I am
> > open to any suggestions or feedback. If anyone is interested in
> > joining hands, collaborating, or investing in any sort of way I'd be
> > interested in talking about it. I am based in San Francisco bayarea.
> >
> I'm about 6,000 miles from San Francisco so can't really offer much
> directly.
>
> > Cheers..
> >
> > Sami
> >
> > sami2065 at gmail.com <mailto:sami2065 at gmail.com>
> >
> >
> >     Re: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
> >     (http:// infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
> >     <http://infolab.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html> )
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
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