Northeastern University Sues Google Over Patent

kihbord writes to mention that Boston's Northeastern University and Waltham, Mass. based company Jarg have brought suit against Google for apparently infringing on a distributed database system developed by Kenneth Baclawski. "The patent describes a distributed database system that breaks search queries into fragments and distributes them to multiple computers in a network to get faster results. The patent was assigned to Northeastern University, which licensed it exclusively to Jarg, according to the lawsuit, filed last Tuesday with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas."

Comments

Patent In Question & University Patent Portfol

[eldavojohn]

A a link to the patent, according to the article with the description:

A distributed computer database system including a front end computer and a plurality of computer nodes interconnected by a network into a search engine. A query from a user is transmitted to the front end computer which forwards the query to one of the computer nodes, termed the home node, of the search engine. The home node fragments the query and hashes the fragments of query to create an index by which the hashed query fragments are transmitted to one or more nodes on the network. Each node on the network which receives a hashed fragment uses the fragment of the query to perform a search on its respective database. The results of the searches of the local databases are then gathered by the home node. However, I submitted this story yesterday and found a list of patents by that professor with that company and suspected a more interesting patent. From that description:

A distributed computer database system connected to a network, e.g., the Internet or on an intranet, indexes interests of agents that have registered with the system, examines information objects, for example, that reside on the network, and, responsive to a match with the registered agents' interests, specifies to the agents the relevant information objects. It's your decision whether or not he's a patent troll but that professor seems to have many patents. I fear that the future only holds more and more patents being acquired by professors. I do not think this was the norm 10 years ago but my professor at George Mason University gave me a very frank lecture one day that essentially spelled out that the university rewards them for these things and the university is building a portfolio. What the states pay a professor is not much compared to what they could be earning in the field so he really has no choice.

I congratulated him on the several patents he just acquired. Although I can't say I was very happy about his recent moves.

Prior art (?)

[geophile]

Breaking a query into pieces and evaluating them at nodes containing a subset of the database has been written about since the 1970s. I read about it in grad school back then. Whether that's actually the thing actually patented by jarg is an entirely separate question. If it is, the PTO has screwed up once again. If it isn't, then perhaps there is a deeper similarity that TFA isn't describing.