PageRank Patent to Expire?
Posted by jonathan at 1:59pm EST on 07/22/2008
I have talked about the PageRank patent before on this blog, but it’s time that we bring up the discussion again.
Today, news has been spreading across the web about how the patent office is changing its policies on what you are and are not allowed to patent.
The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc. Patently O
The irony remains though, Google does not own the patent for PageRank, Stanford University does; Google is simply licensing the patent.
But, with the new PTO policies, this could leave Google [and Stanford] in a precarious situation as far as the patent goes. Will the technology be leaked out, giving others the ability to use it?
I’m quite interested in watching the progression with this and to see where it goes.
What are your thoughts on it?
Vipey
Jul 22nd, 2008
very interesting
PR is only really used by webmasters so i don’t think it would harm google as a search engine but would open the market a bit
Jonathan Dingman
Jul 22nd, 2008
Vipey,
It’s not the matter of who uses PageRank, PageRank is a huge part of the Google algorithm. If Google were to lose ownership of that proprietary algorithm, it would potentially hurt their market share.
In short, it would be dangerous for Google to lose that license and patent.