Slashdot Mirror
Google Patents Browser Highlight All Button
An anonymous reader writes "Google has picked up another patent on a technology that you might think basic to the web: the highlight all button for searches in browsers. The patent will backdate to 1999 and presents an interesting problem for such software as the Firefox browser and FeedDemon RSS reader. And, in an interesting twist, Microsoft uses a similar mechanism in Windows Explorer. But Microsoft itself said that browser technology can't be separated from the operating system. Does that mean the company owes a royalty to Google for all those copies of Windows?"
No, it means software patents are shitty.
Can we just find every single patent that mentions "on a computer" or "in a browser" and have a bonfire?
...would be for Google to litigate via this patent to force dissociation of IE from the rest of Windows.
...though, ironically enough, that's sort of the same thing that ChromeOS is supposed to accomplish, isn't it?
We all win, with that one; the IE/OS intermingling has caused entirely too many security problems for the Windows OS over the years.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Wasn't there ever a clause in patents SOMEWHERE, which said you couldn't patent something which an 'average expert in the field' could come up with?
Because there are quite a few 5 year olds who could have thought this up.
No, it means y'all need to read the fucking patent. It doesn't patent anything going on in the browser. It patents the feature in Google search where it alters the document to highlight certain words, and then pass that modified document back to the client.
> am I missing something?
Yes. Deep pockets.
The term "technology" nowadays means "a few trivial lines of code."
it is high-lighting all terms in all documents received from an internet search. How is that the same as a "highlight all button?" Whatever the case, highlighted searches have existed for a while, so why should this be patentable just because they batch the highlighting to all search results in a "network search"?
What this patent actually is for (from my reading) is a system that highlights the search terms in every page that a user loads. So if I am on the NYT and I do a page search (ctrl-f) for "Julian Assange" it will highlight all the occurrences. The patent is for the notion that when I transfer to the Washington Post all the instances of "Julian Assange" will be highlighted in the new page.
Still pretty weak but not the head slapping obvious it initially looks like.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Windows 98 (but not 95 or 95 OSR2) has this feature in the system Help (winhelp.exe). I have every old version of Windows in VMware, in their default install state with auto-revert.
Just load a fresh Win98 install, press F1, and go to the Search tab. Whatever you search for is highlighted in blue in the help topic that appears on the right side.
The Options button at the top can disable this if you select "Highlighting Off" and you can turn it back on by selecting "Highlighting On"
winhelp.exe is dated May 11, 1998. Must be prior art.
Morphing Software
The authors of vim know they copied Google's highlight all idea. I hope they do the honorable thing.
Which still seems pretty obvious, even circa 1999. However since MS has been shaking down Android manufacturers with similarly questionable patents lately, I have a hard time getting upset about this. If Google were to go on some kind of suing spree an actually went after Mozilla, then that would be pretty upsetting. Being granted the patent does seems very dumb and it puts the problems of patenting software in stark relief (some may say it highlights them ;) ). But if it's some kind of defense versus MS, then I won't lose any sleep.
meep
Claim 1:
...provide a tool bar within a web browser application window, the tool bar including a button, for activating a highlighting operation...
Yep, they're patenting a browser feature. Three slight variations (claims 1, 7, 12), but all browser features.
It appears they're patenting a browser button that will highlight the things you searched for, in any page. I don't use Google Toolbar, but it appears to be already implemented.
With no browser additions, the user has to search for something with Google, go to a page, then open find and search for the exact same terms to find where the relevant information is on the page. With this patented idea implemented, one only has to search for pages, go to one, then click a single button to go to the information on the page.
The summary is, as usual, misleading. To my knowledge, Windows itself has no such feature, nor any other program I've seen for that matter.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
But Google is patenting them in YELLOW, Microsoft did it in BLUE. Clearly not the same thing.
With no browser additions, the user has to search for something with Google, go to a page, then open find and search for the exact same terms to find where the relevant information is on the page. With this patented idea implemented, one only has to search for pages, go to one, then click a single button to go to the information on the page.
That might be in some of the dependent claims, though they're unclear. The independent claims are all quite specific - the browser displays a document, then you type some search terms into a text entry field and press a button, then the browser visually highlights those terms in that document. No cleverness involving search results pages is required to infringe the patent.
And you need to remember how Windows help did exactly what you're describing since (at least) Windows 98. A 12 year old features getting patented now seems to support the 'software patents are shitty' theory.
Hasn't forum software had this for years? I'm not sure how well this would hold up against a REAL defense.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Curious as to how this affects plugins like FireFox's SearchWP that has been around since Feb 2004
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/376/versions/
And how did Google get it back dated to 1999? That was before Chrome even existed and we were in the Internet Explorer 4.0 days and Netscape.
I read the patent and WebSeeker from Blue Squirrel appears to me to be prior art.
It was developed in 1994 and released in 1995. It is a meta search tool that pre-dates the patent and pre-dates Google. It is web and browser based. It has a toolbar that allows you to enter a search term. The pages are modified to highlight the search terms in the browser. While it was never patented, it is prior and appears to be the same thing as the patent claims.
It was developed at a time when every search engine such as Lycos, HotBot, AltaVista, etc. had a portion of the web indexed. WebSeeker searched them all simultaneously, and combined the results into a single list while removing duplicates. The "Filter Find" feature of WebSeeker would downloaded every page, re-index, and display the pages with your keyword highlighted in an embedded IE browser instance.
WebSeeker still exists, still sells, but does not have the market that it once did. Ironically, the dominance of Google meant that searching using multiple search engines wasn't needed anymore. It still works great to keep on top of a specific narrow search term because it remembers what you've seen and monitors for new pages. Still useful for research or competitive analysis in a narrow field.
I was one of the original developers on the project.
Forum software before 1999, perhaps... but not browsers. Patents are very specific. "Like X, but on a browser!" is a valid claim, if X only claims the feature for forum software.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
so yes, it is shitty.
The concept that a feature in another piece of software is somehow novel and doesn't constitute prior art is absurd.