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The most innovative US search engines in 2003
There are several methods to estimate the level of innovation
in the search engine market. We have picked a method that
is verifiable in an objective way: the number of issued patents.
We searched the US Patent & Trademark Office for patents
that have been issued to search engine companies in 2003.
Some of the companies have been issued many more patents than
listed below (e.g. Microsoft) but we tried to include only
those patents that involve search technologies.
Here are the most innovate US search engines in 2003:
| Rank |
Company name |
Number of
search patents |
| 1 |
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA |
11
|
| 2 |
Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA |
4
|
| 3 |
Yahoo! Inc., Santa Clara, CA |
2
|
| 4 |
AltaVista Company, Palo Alto, CA |
1
|
| 4 |
Inktomi Corporation, Foster City, CA |
1
|
| 4 |
Overture Services, Inc., Pasadena, CA |
1
|
| 4 |
Lycos, Inc., Waltham, MA |
1
|
In detail, these are the issued patents:
| Company |
Patent no. |
Title |
| AltaVista |
6,598,051 |
Web page connectivity server |
| Google |
6,526,440 |
Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity |
| Google |
6,529,903 |
Methods and apparatus for using a modified index to provide search results in response to an ambiguous search query
|
| Google |
6,615,209 |
Detecting query-specific duplicate documents
|
| Google |
6,658,423 |
Detecting duplicate and near-duplicate files
|
| Inktomi |
6,564,208 |
Delivering non-default items in association with search results
|
| Lycos |
6,640,218 |
Estimating the usefulness of an item in a collection of information
|
| Microsoft |
6,513,031 |
System for improving search area selection
|
| Microsoft |
6,519,587 |
Database query system and method |
| Microsoft |
6,523,021 |
Business directory search engine |
| Microsoft |
6,525,748 |
Method for downloading a sitemap from a server computer to a client computer in a web environment |
| Microsoft |
6,553,372 |
Natural language information retrieval system |
| Microsoft |
6,556,983 |
Methods and apparatus for finding semantic information, such as usage logs, similar to a query using a pattern lattice data space
|
| Microsoft |
6,584,480 |
Structured documents in a publishing system
|
| Microsoft |
6,594,682 |
Client-side system for scheduling delivery of web content and locally managing the web content
|
| Microsoft |
6,601,059 |
Computerized searching tool with spellchecking
|
| Microsoft |
6,615,237 |
Automatic searching for data in a network
|
| Microsoft |
6,639,610 |
Method and apparatus for assigning URLs to graphical objects in a web page
|
| Overture |
6,665,837 |
Method for identifying related pages in a hyperlinked database
|
| Yahoo |
6,553,364 |
Information retrieval from hierarchical compound documents
|
| Yahoo |
6,631,372 |
Search engine using sales and revenue to weight search results
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If you want, you can read abstracts and full descriptions
of these patents at the US Patent & Trademark Office web
site. Just go the patent
number search page, enter one of the patent numbers above
and click the Search button.
Next week, we'll tell you how some of these patents may affect the ranking algorithms of the search engines in the future. This will allow you to stay one step ahead of your competition.
If you want to know the ranking algorithms that currently
rank your web site, we recommend using IBP's
Top 10 Optimizer which compares your web site with the
top 10 ranked web pages for your keywords on any search engine.
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