WebProWorld
The ability to display advertising to a web surfer based on the contents of their local drive may have a destination in Microsoft’s patent library.
Microsoft applied for a patent that will drive ads to an even greater level of personalization. Users of the company’s software may find this peek at the future a little more foreboding than usual.
The world was relatively quiet last week when Local.com announced it had been awarded a patent on local search. Not so today, as another patent is revealed for an ad-supported 411 local search model. As of right now, 2:30 EDT, shares of Local.com are up 62 percent.
Verizon is first on a London-based company’s list of lawsuits to file (or licensing agreements to be extracted) after winning the rights to a 1999 patent for location-based search. Next up: any online service offering local search services.
If there were any doubt new sites may be spending some time alone on part of the playground, a recent Google patent application seems to define a place where new documents go in their index.
A patent on hyperlinking filed by search site PreFound’s parent company, iLOR, has led to a lawsuit against Google for infringement.
With its purchase of Adscape, Google sent a clear message that it was looking to establish an advertising presence in the worlds of both online and offline gaming. In a patent filing, the company outlines particular strategies that it is seeking to implement to gather specific information on gamers in order to tailor personalized advertising toward them.
For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.
Considering how much competition I often have for certain search terms which everyone seems to be writing about because of common interest, I must have been doing a number of things right.
For now, we’ll put off dark fantasies of robots taking over. No, no, no. No Skynet, no iRobot, none of that. If you don’t want go cross-eyed trying to read a recent Google patent application, just take some smart people’s word for it. Google’s working on a phone technology that knows more about you than you do.
In a recent bevy of application disclosures, it was discovered that in September of last year, Microsoft applied for a patent regarding methodology for notifying Internet users whether or not a particular URL is associated with a list of known phishing sites.
We’ve all gotten the e-mails before. In what appears to be correspondence from a legitimate company, a letter comes across our respective e-mail client urging us to “verify our account information” by giving up the skinny on our bank accounts, credit cards, and social security numbers.
A useful piece of functionality in Visual Studio had been incorporated into the product without attribution to its creator, Michael Kölling of the University of Kent. Microsoft then submitted a patent application for the tool, which they have reasonably withdrawn.
