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Overture Sues Google Over Pay-for-Placement Patent
Ana anonymous submitter wrote: "C|Net News is reporting that Overture is suing Google over its AdWords advertising method since it may be infringing upon Patent 6,269,361 'System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine'."
I believe what they have patented is more of a business
model. Their proprietary algorithms are more in the
arena of fraud detection, people clicking on the same
$4 gambling link 100 times. These are kept as trade
secrets instead of being patented.
Just in case anyone forgot, see Subject. C|Net seems unaware, and refers to Overture as if they had always existed. But it's still the same Idealab-spawned dot-com-bubble outfit that sued Disney's Go.com for trademark infringment and won.
And they STILL haven't turned a profit.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Send you letters to Overture expressing your outrage over this. I've fired them off a nasty-gram. You can contact them by emailing:
feedback@overture.com
Writing a spec and writing a patent have little in common. In addition, patents are usually drafted by lawyers. The patent is intentionally vague and broad. Breadth is where a patent gets its strength. It's not in the drafter's interest to have a precisely-defined patent as that would impair the patent's coverage.
A lawyer would get fired for using the word "composed of" in an application. In patent-speak, "composed of" means "composed exactly of". That is, all I would have to do is add Froot Loops to my search term and poof, no infringement. "Comprising" means the thing has at least those components, and possibly more. In the "comprising" case, Froot Loops would infringe.
The patent does have to define a "complete" system, and that's why they have the bit about the client entering "the search term and the listing". If you've got something materializing out of nowhere, the app gets bounced for incompleteness.
That said, the patent is a monster: 7 independent claims and 60 dependent claims. If you really want to go nuts, read those.
Webposition Gold is a fucking evil little piece of software used by marketing and advertising consultants to measure how Web sites are ranked on various search engines. It bombards the engines with automated queries in order to try to deduce -- and therefore defeat -- their ranking algoritithms.
Google hates that.
Someone on your block was probably using Webposition Gold, so your block got locked out.
There was an article about Overture, I think on Slashdot, that had an interesting attack on spammers who use Overture's advertising. Go to their site overture.com and search for "bulk email" or some similar phrase like "opt-in email", and it'll give you a list of sites that are bidding some amount of money per web hit. The top three bidders for any given set of words also get advertised on several other search engines. Some spammers used to bid as much as $5 for hits, though the maximum today was down to like $2.75.
In the long run, attacks like this probably mainly result in loss of business for Overture :-), but meanwhile it's fun to have a simple method to beat up on some spammers.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This may be a residual effect of people protesting the Xenu.net flap of a month ago.
Basically, Don Marti proposed that people run this shell script:
Google essentially took this to be a DoS attack against their search (which, to a large extent, it is, imho). They started banning IP's which were running this script. When lots of users from Comcast netblocks began running the script, they may have decided to block those netblocks.
Does Comcast happen to use PPPoE? If so, then I would say that Google's actions are warranted, imho.
(We won't mention that Driving Schools would very definately be listed prior to Pizza places, instead we'll assume you meant something like ZZZippy Ron's Driving School).
In the yellow pages you're right and your wrong.
In a category such as "Driving Schools", there are two independent pieces - the listings and the display ads. The Listings are usually in alphabetical order, sometimes by city. (Although I suspect some telephone directory publisher has at some point offered a premium "top of category" listing - but ignore that for a minute). Now the display ads in most directories are in order from largest to smallest. If you're the biggest ad in the section, you get first running in the section, or sometimes the choice of where you run. If you're the next biggest, you get second choice, etc.
Take a look at the display ads and note that they are most definately not in alphabetical order. Occasionally, you'll find a publisher will try to keep a smaller ad on the same page as the listing - but quite often not.
I think the key here is that there are definately pay per placement "prior arts". There are also definately prior arts related to almost anything computer related. The question here is whether the combination of using the "pay per placement" prior art with the "buy a keyword" prior art is both unique enought to be a valid patent, and also whether google's implentation differs enough from the overture prior art to require google to pay royalties to overture.