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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'."
"Basically we've analyzed the patent and determined that we do not infringe on any valid claim that it contains,"
Translation: Your patent sucks ass and we have the money to prove it.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The elements of a valid patent are that the invention be new, useful and non-obvious. This one sounds obvious to me - order them based upon how much they paid you? C'mon, this is pathetic.
If I take a patent out for a "large spherical 'star-island' inhabited with wondrous bacterial-like organisms on top of it's surface" would I then be within my right to own Earth?
Just think of all the Environmentalists I could sue!
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
How is "give us money and we'll rank you higher" an original contribution to art and science? It reminds me of the feminist character at the frat party at the end of PCU, with the dawning realization, "You mean, if you're nice to [males], they bring you stuff?"
It's days like this, where I'm almost ready to write my Senator and try and take an active role, that I look at the decisions being made and say to myself, fuck it, we're too late.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
this is probably just another play for recognition. i had never heard of Overture before this, so i clicked the link to see what they were. woo.. another alta-yahoo-whatever. they're probably hoping to get the traffic, and maybe get some of google's loot if they're lucky.
Although I submitted a story (since rejected) about this, I'm looking for more info. Apparently, Comcast.net customers who try searching Google get the following message...
/search?hl=en&q=slashdot from this server. (Client IP address: *snip*)
403 Forbidden
Your client does not have permission to get URL
Unfortunately, Google has received a significant amount of abuse from your network. Because some person or people on your network have violated our Terms of Service (http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html) and sent us numerous automated search queries, we have been forced to shut off access to Google's services from your network.
Note that we are not accusing you personally of having violated our Terms of Service; you are most likely an innocent victim of someone else's bad behavior. We're really sorry to have had to take this action.
We very much want to be able to work this problem out with your sysadmin or your ISP's network and/or abuse department. Unfortunately, so far, we have not been able to do so. Please contact your sysadmin or your ISP's network and/or abuse department and request that they track down who is causing this problem with Google. Please don't complain to Google about this problem (since there's nothing we can do until the problem on your network has been identified and stopped). Instead, please complain to your sysadmin or your ISP's network and/or abuse department. Letting them know that they need to take immediate action so that you can enjoy full access to the Internet (including Google) is the quickest way for you to regain your Google service.
We wholeheartedly apologize for the inconvenience to you, and with your help, we expect that we'll soon be able provide search results to you once more.
This has been confirmed by myself and 3 friends on Comcast.net. Anyone have more information? Please share with the class.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
A system and method for enabling information providers using a computer network such as the Internet to influence a position for a search listing within a search result list generated by an Internet search engine. The system and method of the present invention provides a database having accounts for the network information providers. Each account contains contact and billing information for a network information provider. In addition, each account contains at least one search listing having at least three components: a description, a search term comprising one or more keywords, and a bid amount. The network information provider may add, delete, or modify a search listing after logging into his or her account via an authentication process. The network information provider influences a position for a search listing in the provider's account by first selecting a search term relevant to the content of the web site or other information source to be listed. The network information provider enters the search term and the description into a search listing. The network information provider influences the position for a search listing through a continuous online competitive bidding process. The bidding process occurs when the network information provider enters a new bid amount, which is preferably a money amount, for a search listing. The system and method of the present invention then compares this bid amount with all other bid amounts for the same search term, and generates a rank value for all search listings having that search term. The rank value generated by the bidding process determines where the network information providers listing will appear on the search results list page that is generated in response to a query of the search term by a searcher located at a client computer on the computer network. A higher bid by a network information provider will result in a higher rank value and a more advantageous placement.
'System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine'.
Specifically, the patent covers a bidding process in which link owners compete in a bidding process to show which bids are highest. Though, in this case, Google is only using this data for the ads on the right sidebar of searches. GoTo.com used the bidding process to insert paid links within its regular search results. The free links would appear afterward.
The application of the technique is where this differs, but this is yet another case of an overly broad patent.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Can I get a patent for a method and system for taking out vague, simplistic patents for the sole purpose of extortion?
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
I must go bash my head now.
make the bad man go away.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If their results are based on how much the site pays, then under what circumstances would they produce more accurate hits than almost any other algorithm for ranking sites?
If no one uses them for searches, then why would web sites pay them money for listing?
I can't see how their business model would work, except if they can make money by suing others.
Ah, now I see how their business model works.
For the 99% of you who didn't read the references:
Overture isn't suing about Google's page rank results, nor do they claim that the ad results are part of the main search. They're saying that the adwords results in and of themselves constitute a pay-for-play search that infringes the patent.
Personally, I think it sounds like a desperation play of a dying company.
Some bad (i.e., obvious/software/business method) patents are on annoying inventions. That's a real dilemma. On the one hand, I don't like to see the USPTO grant bad patents. On the other hand, if patents on spam techniques, search result reordering, and other annoying marketing and business practices get enforced vigorously and hence get used less, our lives get easier. Can someone please patent animated GIFs and the BLINK tag?
What about them... do the methods have to be different, or the same? At what level of difference is there? Obviously a "system" and "method" could mean totally different things. Besides, a method of promoting, or demoting a search result seem to be like an integrial part of any good query system. I mean its all part of data-mining, right? And, what exactly is the definition of computer network? machines connected via the "internet" of computer networked in some other way?
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
"We've recently become aware that (Google is) infringing on our patent, and it's our policy to protect our intellectual property," said Overture spokesman Al Duncan.
Google in February said it would begin auctioning ad-sponsored links on its search-results pages
And they just realized now?!? Personally I think the fact that they waited over a month while letting Google use and integrate this "patented" idea and then without warning suddenly dropping this lawsuit on them shows a deliberate vendetta against Google and this suit should be thrown out on that basis alone.
I stole this Sig
The system and method of the present invention then compares this bid amount with all other bid amounts for the same search term, and generates a rank value for all search listings having that search term
As far as I can tell from watching the Google searches, you search for a term which happens to trigger a paying customers advert, it just appears at the top of the list. No sliding scale of where it appears in relation to other results. It's more of a keyword triggered ad than anything else.
Yet another prime example of why patents shouldn't apply to software.
The entire software industry should kneel down and kiss the feet of IBM, Xerox, and other early software pioneers for not patenting every software related concept... the linked list, the hash table, binary sorts, bubble sorts, grouping data, grouping data and methods, batch processing... because if they had done so, computers would still be in large room in the basements of our universities & large corporations, with little application in our lives.
Just try and think of something that hasn't been affected by computers.
It is sickening to look at many software companies today... always looking for the path of least resistance, and never willing to claim responsibility for thier actions.
It sounds like someone patented the "corruption of the results of one's own search engine."
What the hell kind of patent is that?
:)
The patent might, at a stretch, cover Google's AdWords Select program, since that allows you to pay for a rank amongst other ads. However, it this still doesn't affect the search results, only ads that are clearly ads, so it doesn't sound like the patent would cover this either.
I can't say anything about their Premium Sponsorship program (the one that puts text ads at the top of the page, rather than to the right) since their website doesn't say anything about ranking of those types of ads.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Did you even read the rest of it? The "influencing" they describe is by clients paying for their pages to rank higher in the regular search results, an automated system to bribe for better results, which Google explicitly does not do. Google's ads, which are kept seperate from regular search results, sorta work like this, but this patent really seems to be more relevant to messing with messing with links mixed in with actual search results.
I've said it before the keys to new patents is to take an exisiting technology and combine it with a network (another existing technology), or give it a HTML (XML is the rage now) interface (yet another existing technology), or give it a database backend (what do you know, an existing technology). Bonus points if you can use 2 or even all three.
So thanks to your patent I can now say...
A robot powered BurgerWorld with network interconnectivity between the robots, a web interface to place orders that is generated from a database that has all the different food that the robots know how to make.
I think I'm going to patent a process to go through the patent database (which hopefully I can access by a network with a web interface) to take all existing patents and resubmit them with my patented patent making system.
DEC brought up Alta Vista in 1995 and went public by at least 1996.
They started selling keywords fairly early on as well, which is a mechanism to affect the rank of the results. The only major difference between Alta-Vista's scheme and Google is that Google does it publicly.
The patent was filled in 1999 so prior art from 1998 invalidates it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
This paragraph of the article is phrased badly. The concept of patenting a business method is not new. What's new is that USPTO and the courts are allowing these stupid things to stand.
The Supreme Court wrote a fabulous ruling about bad patents way back in 1950. I urge everyone to read the full ruling and see how utterly it applies to modern events. Here's a couple favorite quotes:
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose
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
DEC did not buy up AltaVista - they wrote it themselves. Sheesh, is history that recent vanishing into the dust of the collective memory already?
Think about it, the "YELLOW" pages are pay for placement, while in the "WHITE" pages most listings are free, excepting businesses who pay extra high rates on thier local phone bill to have bold and two lines instead of one.
Hello! Does the addition of the word internet make this entirely different or something?
Internet adaptations of widely used ideas in print should not be pattented. The search engine just serves to filter the irrelevant from the relevant, something done in the yellow pages by "CATEGORIZATION", its just the with a search engine, the categorization is much more general and can be both a benifit and a detriment to the quality of the searching experience.
My 2cents, but I think I have a point here.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
Wow. This is my first time looking at a patent, and you know what? It reminds me very much of every kind of half-assed spec my client handed me when I was a web programmer.
Read on for analysis:
The system and method of the present invention provides a database
Provides a database? How about "uses," "engages," "is dependent upon"? This usage of "provides" is so far out in left-field that it's almost backwards. And yet, I see this exact mistake a lot.
In addition, each account contains at least one search listing having at least three components: a description, a search term comprising one or more keywords, and a bid amount.
As always, input fields are detailed to a laughably meticulous degree. Not to mention, the usage of "comprising" is backwards. One or more keywords comprise a search term. A search term is composed of one or more keywords.
The network information provider enters the search term and the description into a search listing.
And the physical process of using the application is folded into the spec itself like it's some sort of revelation. "First, the user fires up the application." Woah, crucial info!
The rank value generated by the bidding process determines where the network information providers listing will appear on the search results list page that is generated in response to a query of the search term by a searcher located at a client computer on the computer network.
Meanwhile, the actual guts of the algorithm are never defined, instead replaced with tangential buzzwords like "client computer" and useless information about network topology.
This is the current state-of-the-art in spec, boys. This is why your programming job is hell.
(* How is "give us money and we'll rank you higher" an original contribution to art and science? *)
Soooooooo stupid.
I would love to see a written justification by the granter of the patent. What the living f_____ was going thru his/her stoned little head?
If you patent delivering pizza by ion rocket, they will probably grant it because ion rockets sound like gee-wiz stuff. You are neither inventing pizzas, delivery, *nor* ion rockets. But the combo somehow delights the patent office jerk.
A PHB-like buzzword trigger-bot working over there?
Table-ized A.I.
(begin violation)
SELECT * FROM Matches ORDER BY BribeAmt DESC
(end violation)
Table-ized A.I.
Every patent is the grant of a privilege of exacting tolls from the public. The Framers plainly did not want those monopolies freely granted. The invention, to justify a patent, had to serve the ends of science - to push back the frontiers of chemistry, physics, and the like; to make a distinctive contribution to scientific knowledge. That is why through the years the opinions of the Court commonly have taken "inventive genius" as the test. * It [340 U.S. 147, 155] is not enough that an article is new and useful. The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. Patents serve a higher end - the advancement of science. An invention need not be as startling as an atomic bomb to be patentable. But it has to be of such quality and distinction that masters of the scientific field in which it falls will recognize it as an advance.
One is left to sadly wonder why things have fallen so low.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
absolutely fair point. i apologize for my misreading. if i could retract the post, i would.
I firmly believe that the ranking system in place on google makes it a far better search engine. If I am looking about in their directory, I will more often than not hit the top 10 whether out of lazyness or whatnot. It helps measure the popularity of the site and the usefulness. Weeds out the crap links IMHO.
tinfoilmedia
Geez, some of these patents are crazy. Instead of patenting REAL innovation, many folk are misusing the patent and legal system to try to gain a monopoly on obvious extentions to existing technologies.
I think it's high time we asked Congress to pass a law which results in high damages to those who are caught attempting to patenting inventions that don't require innovation.
Let's see. Drug companies spend millions on research. OK, perhaps they do merit a reward. Maybe a patent is the right thing.
Online retailer creates software so advertisements appear based on user input. Hum, no, I don't think this is a notable innovation that merits a 20 year monopoly.
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.
As I knew quite well because I was sharing an office with Jim Gettys at the time. That is why I said brought up.
Of course given the hash DEC made of Alta Vista business wise they would have been better off well doing almost anything other than they did.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Considering current USPTO policies, it may not be too late to patent these ideas. These innovations are still major opportunities for enterprising developers to generate licensing revenue and help stimulate our economy. I call first dibs on hashtables.
...but I fear there's such a vast quantity of prior art in this area, I would be without a case.
Let me get this straight: you are a 'Devil Advocate' on /., of all places, that quotes Pee Wee Herman in his .sig?
I don't know about everyone else, but I find something deeply moronic and entertaining about this whole scene. At least I'll fall asleep laughing.
After all, we use the Internet, we have systems, we all use computer networks, we generate search listings from the results we get from the engines, and then we influence the position ("Hey, this link from time.com has to be better than joebobmcspanky.com! I'll go there first!").
Please. Google does not implement the system that was patented, homey. Go run a search and then read the patent and then try to actually stand by this argument...
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
I'll instead ask you to support your arguement [sic] with evidence, if you have any.
I say, Watson, I don't believe that was an argument at all. Perhaps after a few more years of experience you will learn to recognize irony when you see it.
irony noun
Pronunciation: 'I-r&-nE also 'I(-&)r-nE
2 a: The use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning. b: A usually humorous or sardonic literary style or form characterized by irony. c : an ironic expression or utterance.
include $sig;
1;
This IBM you mention, this is the same IBM that got 3500 patents in 2001, bringing their total to over 34,000? That IBM?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
All right, NOW he's trolling.
include $sig;
1;
The Yellow Pages are ordered alphabetically. No matter how much ZZZ Pizza pays the Yellow Pages, they will still be listed far after AAAA Comedy Driving School. Overture's patent is a "System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine".
cpeterso
Are there any patent lawyers reading this? I'm interested in patenting the method of increasing sales by naming my business something that begins with multiple letter 'A's so it comes first in the phone book.
Signed John Martin,
President, AAAAmbulance Chasers Insurance Company
_______
2B1ASK1
"We've just been outbid by Cheapo Inkjet Printer Cartridges! Do we raise our bid or fold?"
Just what we needed; day trading for search engine placement.
Google doesn't auction keywords, or at least claims not to.
I don't know if this is the reason you've been blocked out of Google search, but this is a possibility:
Some email harvesting programs use Google and other search engines to search for email addresses. If you enter "house" as the search term, the program will open several network connections to Google to retrieve all the pages that have the search term "house" somewhere on them. There are some 46 million of them at the moment according to Google. Now that the harvesting program has the URLs, it'll get those pages from the web and search for email addresses from the page they just retrieved. Voilà, you have a database of email addresses that have something to do with "house" and you can spam them to hell with mortgage offers. Isn't that beautiful? Some harvesting programs can do the same for Usenet news -- with the help of groups.google.com. It's surprising that your netblock hasn't been blocked out of that (yet).
The point is that getting those millions of hits out of Google will place quite a load on Google search. If I were a Google admin, I'd surely block the network that's causing that kind of problems, especially if the purpose of the exhaustive search is to search for email addresses.
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
The Patent Office isn't charged with ensuring that the patents are valid. Anyone who wants to contest them gets to do that. If you want the PO to ensure validity, you're going to need to give them a lot more funding than they get, since you need top-of-the-field experts in almost every domain to be hanging around.
May we never see th
People, if you want to participate, do the search yourself instead, or strip the session id first.
Say no to software patents.
It's days like this, where I'm almost ready to write my Senator and try and take an active role, that I look at the decisions being made and say to myself, fuck it, we're too late.
Actually, you're not too late... it's never too late to get law changed. Senators and congressmen do not need "prior art" to prove "pay me for top priotity" is not patentable because they've been doing that for decades!! That's way before the internet became common.
So there ya go.
The only time the USPTO wants to see a working example is when you have a Perpetual Motion device. In this country, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
If you purchase keywords on overture and are one of the top 3 bidders, you appear on all the sites they listed including Netscape. I can confirm this as I have a couple of listings online w/overture. They do appear on the netscape page in the section "Partner Search Results". (I also buy space on google.)
I believe the results below are the google results. The Google results do not have any advertisement content in them.
So, when overture says "when you buy space here, you get on x and x and x and x, but if you buy space at google you only get on google", they are exactly correct.
Try looking at the url on the "partner search results" on netscape.
I don't think I would need a script to click 100 times. And the thought that clicking on a banner ad 100 times might get you hauled into court on federal computer tampering charges is pretty chilling.
What are they then? Expensive rubber-stampers?
In other words, if they aren't supposed to check that the patent's even valid [*], what the hell are they doing?
[*] Note: by valid I mean useful, non-obvious and innovative. I don't include whether it works or not. But that should be irrelevant because if you patent a process or machine that doesn't work, who cares? Of course the patent office now allows the patenting of vague ideas, which makes a mockery of the whole system.
Female Prison Rape in NY
The Patent Office isn't charged with ensuring that the patents are valid.
Why bother with having a patent office at all, the applicants could just rubber stamp their own applications...
If you want the PO to ensure validity, you're going to need to give them a lot more funding than they get, since you need top-of-the-field experts in almost every domain to be hanging around.
Or there is the radical idea that the fee paid with the application is there to fund any validity checking which may be needed. You could possibly have both a non returnable fee and a deposit against friviolous or fraudulent applications.
Google's ads, which are kept seperate from regular search results, sorta work like this
:
The sorta do, but then again they sorta don't.
The CPC (Cost Per Click) package you choose has some bearing just on AdWord Select, but in conjunction with the number of clickthroughs you get
"Your clickthrough rate and CPC together determine where your ads are shown, so better ads rise to the top. That means no one can lock you out of the top position."
For standard Google AdWords :
"Google positions your ad based on how many users click on it over time."
Both quotes from Google.
Seems like an extremely fair policy to me.
Information wants to be beer.
I will stop this ridiculous insanity once and for all by enforcing MY patent #5,163,447 on:
"A method for stopping patent infringements by suing the party committing the infringement."
That's right. I have a patent on suing over patents.
I will be demanding royalties from every jerk suing over a patent by USING my own patented process of suing infringers!
-
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
With a website called GOTO they have to be messed up. No wonder they got a patent.
...
Patent Clerk:"Yes! Here is your patent. Just stop making me read uncommented GOTO code! Arghh
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
"The big fear...here is that ... We wouldn't have paid listings at all."
I hope nobody gets a patent on bugs in programs. My biggest fear is that we wouldn't have bugs in programs at all.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.