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How did they even get that patent? It's a well known 70s era bibliometric algorithm.
by aneil 4y ago
How did they even get that patent? It's a well known 70s era bibliometric algorithm.
- dylan604 4y agoConan The Librarian should have protected us from the evil algo
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe patent was actually assigned to Stanford University, and Google then licensed it (this is also how most pharmaceutical discovery is patented and licensed). A fundamental problem is that these patents all rely on federal funds from US taxpayers to one extent or the other, and while it may make sense for Stanford to hold the patent, there's a strong argument that any US entity should be able to license it (not just one exclusive license in other words). Prior to Bayh-Dole legislation in the 1980s, this was the case for university-held patents: they could be not be exclusively licensed. Repealing that legislation would be a good idea to avoid the rise of monopolisitic behemoths like Google/Alphabet.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 4y agoDoesn’t answer the question. Rephrased: Why was the patent granted if prior art existed from the 70s?
- DANK_YACHT 4y agoThe patent approval process isn't perfect. Had you violated the patent, and had Google sued you, you could always argue prior art. What would your evidence be?
- IshKebab 4y agoAs I understand it it's much harder and more expensive to win a prior art claim after a patent has been granted.
- kmeisthax 4y agoThe patent office could have just missed the prior art, or more likely is that the claims are more narrow than and represent an improvement upon said prior art.
- iamcurious 4y agoWhat is the name?
- jey 4y ago> It's a well known 70s era bibliometric algorithm. Citation needed
- aneil 4y agoI was thinking of the Pinski-Narin method, but there are other earlier uses of eigenvector calculations over very similar data: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2858.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.2858.pdf
- kmeisthax 4y agoThe patent doesn't cover just ranking documents based on their citations; it also covers various ways to extract "citations" from a webpage, weighting the pages to determine their importance, and doing all of this efficiently enough that you can process millions of queries per second.