Cre8asite Administrator Bill Slawski does it again by posting five (yes you heard me right) different threads discussing two Google patents, two Yahoo patents and one MSN patent. Lets start with Google.
Google Patents: - Variable personalization of search results Bill explains;
This invention would enable a searcher to fill out a profile, perform a normal search, and then use a slider button to indicate how much his or her personal information from the profile should be used to modify (rerank) that search based upon the personalization information that they have entered into the profile, by sliding the button partially, or all the way to a full influence on the results.
- Google Help with Advertising Creatives Bill explains;
This invention is aimed at novices to advertising, and to individuals or small business owners that may not have a web presence, or may need assistance in coming up with creatives, keywords, etc... The description of their "Advertising Generation Engine" is interesting, including the generation of a creative. I'm wondering where they will be getting their "eye catching images."
Yahoo Patents: - Yahoo! Color Graphing and Personalization Bill didn't have enough time to summarize, but the patent application's abstract reads;
In a search processing system, identifying input authority weights for a plurality of pages, wherein an input authority weight represents a user's weight of a page in terms of interest; distributing a page's input authority weight over one or more pages that are linked in a graph to the page; and using a resulting authority weight for a page in effecting a search result list. The search result list might comprise one or more of reordering search hits and highlighting search hits.
- Inverse searches and User Annotations Bill explains;
Imagine being about to enter a URL, and find out information about the site, collected over time, such as which other sites point to it, what other people feel about it, and more. A couple of new patent applications from Yahoo! cover these types of topics.This is really two patents in this one thread.
MSN Patent: - Assigning textual ads based on article history Bill explains;
There's something to this new patent application from Microsoft that reminds me of the movie Minority Report, where the protagonist goes through a shopping area, and his past purchases inform the billboards and advertisements of his potential future interests... Collecting keywords from pages that you've visited in the past, to decide what ads to show you now? It's an attempt, somewhat, to get away from contextual based ads that may not be appropriate...
Makes for some nice light reading... :)
