1. Search and Social Patents for 2012
and Beyond
Thursday, Mar 15 2012, 5:30p.m. - 7:00p.m.
SEER Interactive "Search Church",
Philadelphia, PA, United States
Bill Slawski, SEO by the Sea
http://www.seobythesea.com @bill_slawski

2. Disclaimer
Some of the stuff described in patents might
happen, and some of the stuff described in
patents might not.
That’s half the fun…

3. A Different Perspective…
Image courtesy of Silveira Neto at http://www.flickr.com/photos/silveiraneto/
10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 8 - Assigning Geographic Relevance to Web Pages
I had an epiphany in second grade…

4. While Google has been developing their own
patents and acquiring small and large
companies, they’ve also been acquiring some
unusual patents…
 Terminator Vision? 
Google Acquires Swimming Goggle Patent
Google Picks Up Hardware and Media Patents from Outland Research

5. Granted Google Patents
• October 24, 2008 – 187 granted patents
• February 6, 2011 – 809 granted patents
• March 14, 2012 – 4,163 granted patents
• Approximately 17,000 granted Motorola patents
to come.
Official Google Blog - Patents and innovation

6. Will Google Become a Hardware
Manufacturer?
• Motorola
Phones/Set Top
Boxes
• Self aware driving
cars
• Google Store
Rumors
• Net Appliances
• Google TVs

7. Hires Wii hacker/Kinect developer Johnny Chung Lee from Microsoft
Acquires patent for Harry Potter like voice activated game controller
Launches Google Play
High Definition Streaming Video patents from Swarmcast
Will Google Become an Entertainment
Center?

8. View and Voice Controlled Entertainment Modules

9. Will Google Become an ISP/internet
television provider?
• Google Fiber Community Project
• Kansas City Application to provide TV
• Pirelli fiber optics patent acquisition
• Periodic Micro Transmission Line Patents
• FCC application for Earth Station Receivers
Google Acquires Fiber Optic Networking Patents (Kansas City and then the World?)
Is Google Aiming at Building Faster Networks and Data Transmissions?

10. Will Google build flying motorcycles?*
*Not Google’s patent
Combination powered parachute and motorcycle

11. Will Google Stay a Search Engine?
• Xerox patents on scoring document quality
• IBM patents on databases, computer architecture,
network devices, search
• Updated Stanford PageRank patents
• 500 + Google updates/year on core ranking algorithms,
some with patents.

12. Expanding Relevance
• Keyword Matching
• Categorization
• Informational Needs
• Situational Needs
Nature and Manifestations of Relevance - Tefko Saracevic (pdf)
Relevance: The ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that
satisfies the needs of the user. —Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2005)

13. Concurrent Search Approaches
• Phrase-Based Indexing
• Concept-Based Indexing
• Triples of Data (User, Query, Site)
• Building a Knowledge Base
• Planet Scale Distributed Data

14. Phrase-Based Indexing
10 Most Important SEO Patents, Part 5 - Phrase Based Indexing

15. Concept Based Indexing
Editing a network of interconnected concepts

17. Triples of Data
An instance is a “triple” of data: (u, q, d) where:
• u is user information,
• q is query data from the user,
• d is document information relating to pages
returned from the query data.
Imagine a search engine building a huge statistical model about
searchers, searches and documents, where it creates profiles for
all three, and uses “instances” of data to recommend pages for
searchers similar to how Amazon might recommend books or
other products…
Google and Large Scale Data Models Like Panda

18. A system ranks documents based, at least in
part, on a ranking model. The ranking model
may be generated to predict the likelihood
that a document will be selected. The system
may receive a search query and identify
documents relating to the search query. The
system may then rank the documents based,
at least in part, on the ranking model and
form search results for the search query from
the ranked documents.

19. Building a Knowledge Base
Freebase - Empire State Building entry
Google Gets Smarter with Named Entities: Acquires MetaWeb
Google Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever

20. With a named entity in the query, Google assumes that the searcher wanted a
“site:” search

21. Planet Scale Distributed Data
How Google Data Centers may be Split between Regional and Global Data

22. Will Google Stay a Search Social
Engine?
• Grouptivity - Content Shares ranking
• Agent Rank - digital signatures
• New Agent Rank – Not all +1s equal
• Katango – Personal Crowd Control
• Confucius – User Rank
• WOWD – User Click Page Ranking

23. Grouptivity - Content Shares ranking
Patent filings acquired 10 months before Google
Plus
Sometimes sharing with a smaller group but
getting more reshares/retweets is better than
sharing with a larger audience and getting less
Google Plus Roots are Showing in Grouptivity Patent Filings
Page Ranking System Employing User Sharing Data

24. ankesh kumar
02/22/2012 at 6:55 pm
I’m the founder of Grouptivity/Sharetivity and you
are correct in your assertions that we had a
direction we wanted to take the company.
Unfortunately, since we could not get funding nor
traction, I decided to sell the IP and focus on a
new venture. Wish I had Google’s road map,
might have got a few more dollars:)
Inventor's comment

25. Agent Rank - digital signatures
• Digital Signatures associated with content
• Reputation ranking
• Fixes attribution problems with duplicate
content
• Content is associated with profile
Google’s Agent Rank Patent Application

26. New Agent Rank – Not all +1s equal
• Trusted Agents
• Endorsements, not of content, but of author
Are You Trusted by Google?
“Not all references, however, are necessarily of equal significance.
For example, a reference by another agent with a high reputational
score is of greater significance than a reference by another agent
with a low reputational score.
Thus, the reputation of a particular agent, and therefore the
reputational score assigned to the particular agent, should depend
not just on the number of references to the content signed by the
particular agent, but on the importance of the referring documents
and other agents.”

27. Katango – Personal Crowd Control
• Originally created an iPhone App for Facebook
for Clustering Contacts
• Patented an Intelligent User Agent
• Include links to other social networks in your
profile
• Agent monitors social activities outside
Google without buy-in from other social
services
• Those activities could be used in rankings…
Katango Intelligent Social Media Agents

28. Confucius – User Rank
• Onebox Q&A in search results
• Google’s Codename for Q&A social networks
• Confucius Process
• User Rank based upon credential scores
– Contributions
– Meaningful interactions
– Topic specific
Confucius and Its Intelligent Disciples: Integrating Social with Search (pdf)
Ranking User Generated Web Content
How Google Might Rank User Generated Web Content in Google + and Other Social Networks

29. User Rank -Weighing Social
Contributions
• Relevance of content to a query
• Appropriateness of language (e.g., lack of
profanity),
• Originality in relation to previously-posted
content.

30. User Rank - Weighing Quality of
Responses
• Relevance to original post/question,
• Appropriateness of language used (e.g., lack
of profanity)
• Specificity of response (idf),
• Originality in relation to previously-posted
responses, or
• Promptness in relation to the timestamp of
the original posting.

31. User Rank - Credential Scores
• A response to a high quality question/post with a high
quality answer, can positively impact a credential
score.
• A responds to a question/post with a low quality
answer, may negatively impact a credential score.
• Responding to someone with a high credential score,
may more positively impact their credential score than
responding to someone with a low credential score.
• Post something and receive high quality responses
from people with high credential scores, that
interaction can positively impact yours credential
score.

32. WOWD – User Page Ranking
• Crowd sourcing the crawling of websites, by
actually tracking clicks upon links from one
page to another.
• Identifying rankings based upon clicks, time
spent on pages, frequency of visits, keywords
in visited pages, bookmarking of pages…
Wow! Google Acquires Wowd Search Patents
System for User Driven Ranking of Web Pages
System and Method for Recommendation of Interesting Web Pages Based on User Browsing Actions

33. Thank you!
And thanks to Seer Interactive for hosting this
talk….

34. Questions?
• Contact me at bill (at) seobythesea (dot) com
• Or @bill_slawski on Twitter
• At Google Plus
• Or through my contact form at SEO by the Sea