search and social patents for 2012 and beyond

Search and Social Patents for 2012 and Beyond

Thursday, Mar 15 2012, 5:30p.m. - 7:00p.m. SEER Interactive "Search Church",

Philadelphia, PA, United States

Bill Slawski, SEO by the Seahttp://www.seobythesea.com @bill_slawski

Disclaimer

Some of the stuff described in patents might happen, and some of the stuff described in patents might not.

That’s half the fun…

A Different Perspective…

Image courtesy of Silveira Neto at http://www.flickr.com/photos/silveiraneto/

10 Most Important SEO Patents: Part 8 - Assigning Geographic Relevance to Web Pages

I had an epiphany in second grade…

While Google has been developing their own patents and acquiring small and large companies, they’ve also been acquiring some unusual patents…

Terminator Vision?

Google Acquires Swimming Goggle PatentGoogle Picks Up Hardware and Media Patents from Outland Research

Granted Google Patents

• October 24, 2008 – 187 granted patents• February 6, 2011 – 809 granted patents• March 14, 2012 – 4,163 granted patents• Approximately 17,000 granted Motorola patents to

come. Official Google Blog - Patents and innovation

Will Google Become a Hardware Manufacturer?

• Motorola Phones/Set Top

Boxes• Self aware driving

cars• Google Store

Rumors• Net Appliances• Google TVs

Hires Wii hacker/Kinect developer Johnny Chung Lee from MicrosoftAcquires patent for Harry Potter like voice activated game controllerLaunches Google PlayHigh Definition Streaming Video patents from Swarmcast

Will Google Become an Entertainment Center?

View and Voice Controlled Entertainment Modules

Will Google Become an ISP/internet television provider?

• Google Fiber Community Project• Kansas City Application to provide TV• Pirelli fiber optics patent acquisition• Periodic Micro Transmission Line Patents• FCC application for Earth Station Receivers

Google Acquires Fiber Optic Networking Patents (Kansas City and then the World?)Is Google Aiming at Building Faster Networks and Data Transmissions?

Will Google build flying motorcycles?*

*Not Google’s patentCombination powered parachute and motorcycle

Will Google Stay a Search Engine?

• Xerox patents on scoring document quality• IBM patents on databases, computer architecture, network

devices, search• Updated Stanford PageRank patents• 500 + Google updates/year on core ranking algorithms, some

with patents.

Expanding Relevance

• Keyword Matching • Categorization• Informational Needs• Situational Needs

Nature and Manifestations of Relevance - Tefko Saracevic (pdf)

Relevance: The ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user. —Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2005)

Concurrent Search Approaches• Phrase-Based Indexing• Concept-Based Indexing• Triples of Data (User, Query, Site)• Building a Knowledge Base• Planet Scale Distributed Data

Phrase-Based Indexing

10 Most Important SEO Patents, Part 5 - Phrase Based Indexing

Concept Based Indexing

Editing a network of interconnected concepts

Triples of Data

An instance is a “triple” of data: (u, q, d) where:

• u is user information, • q is query data from the user, • d is document information relating to pages returned

from the query data.

Imagine a search engine building a huge statistical model about searchers, searches and documents, where it creates profiles for all three, and uses “instances” of data to recommend pages for searchers similar to how Amazon might recommend books or other products…

Google and Large Scale Data Models Like Panda

A system ranks documents based, at least in part, on a ranking model. The ranking model may be generated to predict the likelihood that a document will be selected. The system may receive a search query and identify documents relating to the search query. The system may then rank the documents based, at least in part, on the ranking model and form search results for the search query from the ranked documents.

Building a Knowledge Base

Freebase - Empire State Building entryGoogle Gets Smarter with Named Entities: Acquires MetaWebGoogle Knowledge Graph Could Change Search Forever

With a named entity in the query, Google assumes that the searcher wanted a “site:” search

Planet Scale Distributed Data

How Google Data Centers may be Split between Regional and Global Data

Will Google Stay a Search Social Engine?

• Grouptivity - Content Shares ranking• Agent Rank - digital signatures• New Agent Rank – Not all +1s equal• Katango – Personal Crowd Control• Confucius – User Rank• WOWD – User Click Page Ranking

Grouptivity - Content Shares ranking

Patent filings acquired 10 months before Google Plus

Sometimes sharing with a smaller group but getting more reshares/retweets is better than sharing with a larger audience and getting less

Google Plus Roots are Showing in Grouptivity Patent FilingsPage Ranking System Employing User Sharing Data

ankesh kumar02/22/2012 at 6:55 pm

I’m the founder of Grouptivity/Sharetivity and you are correct in your assertions that we had a direction we wanted to take the company. Unfortunately, since we could not get funding nor traction, I decided to sell the IP and focus on a new venture. Wish I had Google’s road map, might have got a few more dollars:)

Inventor's comment

Agent Rank - digital signatures

• Digital Signatures associated with content• Reputation ranking• Fixes attribution problems with duplicate

content• Content is associated with profile

Google’s Agent Rank Patent Application

New Agent Rank – Not all +1s equal

• Trusted Agents• Endorsements, not of content, but of author

Are You Trusted by Google?

“Not all references, however, are necessarily of equal significance. For example, a reference by another agent with a high reputational score is of greater significance than a reference by another agent with a low reputational score.

Thus, the reputation of a particular agent, and therefore the reputational score assigned to the particular agent, should depend not just on the number of references to the content signed by the particular agent, but on the importance of the referring documents and other agents.”

Katango – Personal Crowd Control

• Originally created an iPhone App for Facebook for Clustering Contacts

• Patented an Intelligent User Agent• Include links to other social networks in your

profile• Agent monitors social activities outside

Google without buy-in from other social services

• Those activities could be used in rankings…

Katango Intelligent Social Media Agents

Confucius – User Rank

• Onebox Q&A in search results• Google’s Codename for Q&A social networks• Confucius Process• User Rank based upon credential scores– Contributions– Meaningful interactions– Topic specific

Confucius and Its Intelligent Disciples: Integrating Social with Search (pdf)Ranking User Generated Web ContentHow Google Might Rank User Generated Web Content in Google + and Other Social Networks

User Rank -Weighing Social Contributions

• Relevance of content to a query• Appropriateness of language (e.g., lack of

profanity), • Originality in relation to previously-posted

content.

User Rank - Weighing Quality of Responses

• Relevance to original post/question,• Appropriateness of language used (e.g., lack of

profanity)• Specificity of response (idf),• Originality in relation to previously-posted

responses, or• Promptness in relation to the timestamp of

the original posting.

User Rank - Credential Scores• A response to a high quality question/post with a high

quality answer, can positively impact a credential score.• A responds to a question/post with a low quality answer,

may negatively impact a credential score.• Responding to someone with a high credential score,

may more positively impact their credential score than responding to someone with a low credential score.

• Post something and receive high quality responses from people with high credential scores, that interaction can positively impact yours credential score.

WOWD – User Page Ranking

• Crowd sourcing the crawling of websites, by actually tracking clicks upon links from one page to another.

• Identifying rankings based upon clicks, time spent on pages, frequency of visits, keywords in visited pages, bookmarking of pages…

Wow! Google Acquires Wowd Search PatentsSystem for User Driven Ranking of Web Pages System and Method for Recommendation of Interesting Web Pages Based on User Browsing Actions

Thank you!

And thanks to Seer Interactive for hosting this talk….

Questions?

• Contact me at bill (at) seobythesea (dot) com• Or @bill_slawski on Twitter• At Google Plus• Or through my contact form at SEO by the Sea