Special thanks to Gary Price at Resource Shelf for this excellent list of patents awarded to Search Engines and Search related technology.
Resource Shelf will be publishing these search engine patents monthly and the Search Engine Journal will be also bringing them to our readers (thanks Gary)!
A Selection of Recently Awarded Search-Related Patents & Recently Published Search-Related Patent Applications
Recently Awarded Patents
+ System and method for automated multimedia content indexing and retrieval
Assignee: AT&T
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+ Use of browser cookies to store structured data
Assignee: Amazon.com
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+ Method and system for creating vertical search engines
Assignee: Logika Corporation
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+ Methods and systems for providing information based on similarity
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+ Method and system for generating a set of search terms
Assignee: Overture (now part of Yahoo)
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+ Weighted preference data search system and method
Assignee: Auguri
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+ Method for automatic selection of databases for searching
Assignee: BrightPlanet
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+ Method, apparatus, and system for previewing search results
Assignee: Siebel Systems
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+ Delivering non-default items in association with search results
Assignee: Inktomi (now part of Yahoo)
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+ Method for estimating coverage of web search engines
Note: Inventors listed as Krishna Bahrat (now at Google) and Andrei Broder (formerly CTO at AltaVista, now at IBM Research)
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+ Method of doing business by identifying customers of competitors through world wide web searches of job listing databases e: IBM
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+ Retrieval of relevant information categories
Assignee: Microsoft
NOTE: You can find a compilation of other MS search-related patents here.
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+ System and method for retrieving information according to improved matching criteria
Assignee: i2
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+ Accessing information from a collection of data
Assignee: iPhrase
Note: Another patent was awarded to iPhrase in March.
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+ Information search device and information search method using topic-centric query routing
Assignee: NEC and The University of Washington
NOTE: Oren Etzioni is listed as a co-inventor.
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+ Systems and methods for performing crawl searches and index searches
Assignee: Xerox
Recently Published Search-Related Patent Applications
+ Methods and apparatus for serving relevant advertisements
+ Serving advertisements using information associated with e-mail
The first patent app lists Google as the assignee. Although Google is not listed as the assignee on the second app, the inventors are identical to the first app.
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+ Method for searching for, selecting and mapping web pages
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+ Method and system for creating improved search queries
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+ Relevant search rankings using high refresh-rate distributed crawling
