Google and Patents
Google has started his long awaited patent search for patents filed with the US patent office. At the same time they have been granted (yet another) patent them selves interestingly enough on the layout of their homepage “The ornamental design for a graphical user interface, as shown and described”.
I think its generally a good thing to apply tools that have proven to work (google search interface) for other ares like searches for patents in this case. It remains unclear to me how much of an improvement this is for the average internet user interested in US patents as the is offering a public search already.
Definitely worrying is the patent on the ornamental design of the homepage. After the nice open source move with the GWT I feel somewhat betrayed. Not that I would not concede them their logo, algorithm, PageRank etc, but the design of the one input field one button search? I assume that it will be difficult to claim any charges for copying if you do not reproduce a 1:1 copy, but is elgooG for instance in trouble now? What about sites that do the same and look similar - like metacrawler or very similar - like Altavista (logo, input field, category links)?
Another question I have is: “How do I find this freaking patent through the Google patent search interface”? This one does not work. :)
No tags for this post.