Some search related patent applications

9/8/2005 - looks like these were published a week ahead of time. The links are back online, and working correctly now, and patent applications from last week are also available.

Added on the morning of 9/2/2005 - it appears that the US Patent Office realized that they had the wrong date on the thousands and thousands of patent applications that were published yesterday, or that they had next weeks patents online instead of this week's applications.

The fallout from that discovery is that the links to the patent applications listed below no longer work. The link to the white paper on The Bloomba Personal Content Database still works, though.

I will attempt to repair these links as soon as the Patent Office gets the documents back online.


Published today (though showing a September 8th publication date), the following patent applications looked interesting:

Network traffic monitoring for search popularity analysis

Assessing the popularity of web pages by actually monitoring traffic to those pages with enhanced packet sniffers, and relaying that information to a system that uses a pagerank like system to rank pages.

Keyword recommendation for internet search engines

Using past queries to a search engine to identify and recommend alternative keywords to a person who has entered a query for a search.


Principles and methods for personalizing newsfeeds via an analysis of information novelty and dynamics

A Microsoft approach to personalizing news feeds.


Techniques for parental control of internet access including a guest mode

Yahoo! filters the web, so you don't have to.


Systems and methods for indexing content for fast and scalable retrieval


Raymie Stata's Bloomba Personal Content Database brings Yahoo! a search capability that goes much further than the desktop.

Word collection method and system for use in word-breaking

Microsoft breaks words, so you don't have to.

Surfing with a Hand Held

I bought a PDA that enables me to surf the web this spring. I like it a lot, but it's shown me that the owners of a lot of sites haven't recognized that people viewing their pages on a small screen is more and more something that will happen.

Cameron Moll looks at some of the ways that sites can prepare themselves for people like me, who want a good experience when visiting their sites with a series of articles on Mobile Web Design.

So far, it has covered the state of mobile computing, and some of the approaches to designing a site with mobile users in mind. I look forward to the last two parts on "Tips and Techniques" for design, and "Application in the Real World."

One article that the first in the series points to this page: 10 Reasons to Publish to Mobile. Some excellent points in there. It's well worth considering how mobile publishing can benefit your business. This is especially true if you are a smaller, leaner, faster business, that can benefit from the agility to change and adapt to future business patterns and changes in technology. One of the points made in the article is that there are 3 times as many mobile devices out in the world today as there are PCs.