Overture Sues Google Over Pay-for-Placement Patent 256
Ana anonymous submitter wrote: "C|Net News is reporting that Overture is suing Google over its AdWords advertising method since it may be infringing upon Patent 6,269,361 'System and method for influencing a position on a search result list generated by a computer network search engine'."
New, useful and non-obvious (Score:2, Informative)
I used to work at GoTo (now Overture) (Score:4, Informative)
model. Their proprietary algorithms are more in the
arena of fraud detection, people clicking on the same
$4 gambling link 100 times. These are kept as trade
secrets instead of being patented.
The abstract... (Score:2, Informative)
A system and method for enabling information providers using a computer network such as the Internet to influence a position for a search listing within a search result list generated by an Internet search engine. The system and method of the present invention provides a database having accounts for the network information providers. Each account contains contact and billing information for a network information provider. In addition, each account contains at least one search listing having at least three components: a description, a search term comprising one or more keywords, and a bid amount. The network information provider may add, delete, or modify a search listing after logging into his or her account via an authentication process. The network information provider influences a position for a search listing in the provider's account by first selecting a search term relevant to the content of the web site or other information source to be listed. The network information provider enters the search term and the description into a search listing. The network information provider influences the position for a search listing through a continuous online competitive bidding process. The bidding process occurs when the network information provider enters a new bid amount, which is preferably a money amount, for a search listing. The system and method of the present invention then compares this bid amount with all other bid amounts for the same search term, and generates a rank value for all search listings having that search term. The rank value generated by the bidding process determines where the network information providers listing will appear on the search results list page that is generated in response to a query of the search term by a searcher located at a client computer on the computer network. A higher bid by a network information provider will result in a higher rank value and a more advantageous placement.
Overture == Goto.com (Score:4, Informative)
And they STILL haven't turned a profit.
Contact Overture (Score:3, Informative)
feedback@overture.com
Re:Why would anyone use Overture? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:how (not) to write spec (Score:5, Informative)
A lawyer would get fired for using the word "composed of" in an application. In patent-speak, "composed of" means "composed exactly of". That is, all I would have to do is add Froot Loops to my search term and poof, no infringement. "Comprising" means the thing has at least those components, and possibly more. In the "comprising" case, Froot Loops would infringe.
The patent does have to define a "complete" system, and that's why they have the bit about the client entering "the search term and the listing". If you've got something materializing out of nowhere, the app gets bounced for incompleteness.
That said, the patent is a monster: 7 independent claims and 60 dependent claims. If you really want to go nuts, read those.
Re:Why would anyone use Overture? (Score:1, Informative)
A benefit to bidding on Overture is that their top three results for a given search term show up in MSN, Yahoo!, Aol and several others. That being said, with a bidding in the top three positions for search terms you are targetting, not only do you get on Overture, but you get exposure through it's partner's sites as well. With the other search engines that they provide results for, you can get pretty good exposure across the board. But that doesn't include Google, which brings in about half of my hobby site's search engine traffic ; )
It's all about Webposition Gold (Score:4, Informative)
Webposition Gold [webposition.com] is a fucking evil little piece of software used by marketing and advertising consultants to measure how Web sites are ranked on various search engines. It bombards the engines with automated queries in order to try to deduce -- and therefore defeat -- their ranking algoritithms.
Google hates that.
Someone on your block was probably using Webposition Gold, so your block got locked out.
Slashdot attacks on spammers with Overture (Score:3, Informative)
There was an article about Overture, I think on Slashdot, that had an interesting attack on spammers who use Overture's advertising. Go to their site overture.com [overture.com] and search for "bulk email" [overture.com] or some similar phrase like "opt-in email", and it'll give you a list of sites that are bidding some amount of money per web hit. The top three bidders for any given set of words also get advertised on several other search engines. Some spammers used to bid as much as $5 for hits, though the maximum today was down to like $2.75.
In the long run, attacks like this probably mainly result in loss of business for Overture :-), but meanwhile it's fun to have a simple method to beat up on some spammers.
You may have a spammer on your netblock (Score:2, Informative)
Some email harvesting programs use Google and other search engines to search for email addresses. If you enter "house" as the search term, the program will open several network connections to Google to retrieve all the pages that have the search term "house" somewhere on them. There are some 46 million of them at the moment according to Google. Now that the harvesting program has the URLs, it'll get those pages from the web and search for email addresses from the page they just retrieved. Voilà, you have a database of email addresses that have something to do with "house" and you can spam them to hell with mortgage offers. Isn't that beautiful? Some harvesting programs can do the same for Usenet news -- with the help of groups.google.com [google.com]. It's surprising that your netblock hasn't been blocked out of that (yet).
The point is that getting those millions of hits out of Google will place quite a load on Google search. If I were a Google admin, I'd surely block the network that's causing that kind of problems, especially if the purpose of the exhaustive search is to search for email addresses.
Re:On a side note... (Score:5, Informative)
This may be a residual effect of people protesting the Xenu.net flap of a month ago.
Basically, Don Marti proposed that people run this shell script:
Google essentially took this to be a DoS attack against their search (which, to a large extent, it is, imho). They started banning IP's which were running this script. When lots of users from Comcast netblocks began running the script, they may have decided to block those netblocks.
Does Comcast happen to use PPPoE? If so, then I would say that Google's actions are warranted, imho.
FindWhat is already challenging this Patent (Score:1, Informative)
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020124/242089_1.html
Re:but the Yellow Pages are ordered alphabetically (Score:3, Informative)
(We won't mention that Driving Schools would very definately be listed prior to Pizza places, instead we'll assume you meant something like ZZZippy Ron's Driving School).
In the yellow pages you're right and your wrong.
In a category such as "Driving Schools", there are two independent pieces - the listings and the display ads. The Listings are usually in alphabetical order, sometimes by city. (Although I suspect some telephone directory publisher has at some point offered a premium "top of category" listing - but ignore that for a minute). Now the display ads in most directories are in order from largest to smallest. If you're the biggest ad in the section, you get first running in the section, or sometimes the choice of where you run. If you're the next biggest, you get second choice, etc.
Take a look at the display ads and note that they are most definately not in alphabetical order. Occasionally, you'll find a publisher will try to keep a smaller ad on the same page as the listing - but quite often not.
I think the key here is that there are definately pay per placement "prior arts". There are also definately prior arts related to almost anything computer related. The question here is whether the combination of using the "pay per placement" prior art with the "buy a keyword" prior art is both unique enought to be a valid patent, and also whether google's implentation differs enough from the overture prior art to require google to pay royalties to overture.
Re:Hmmnn...okay, how about this: (Score:1, Informative)