In July, Google launched a beta version of their Page Speed Service, which collects content from your pages on the fly, and republishes it on a proxy, rewritten in a manner that should provide faster pages. Search Engine Watch wrote about this proxy service on July 29, 2011, and Adam Hopkinson in the comments points to details about the configuration page one sets up to control this service. The service appears to be one that Google will charge for once the beta is over.
What if Google also offered the ability to do other things through that proxy service such as offer localization of those pages, with the ability to set up translations of text on the page in different languages, or to change logos and other images for viewers from certain locations?
Imagine that rather than using machine translation, you could edit the proxy versions of your page through a browser, like the service from Israel that NETMASK Internet Technologies provides with their Netmask.IT! tool. That tool can work on webpages as well as on software products. Customers of Netmask Internet Technologies in the past, for at least the software localization that they offer, have included Siemens, Compaq, IBM, Data General, Sun, Oracle, Motorola, HP, and SGI.
Google was assigned the patents behind Netmask’s technology this past month, according to the USPTO assignment database, which doesn’t provide details of the transaction other than a September 1st assignment recorded on September 20th.
We don’t know if Google will expand the Page Speed service to include the kind of localization offered in the patents, as well as some security measures described in one of them that includes a digital rights management approach that can make it difficult for automated scrapers to copy the content of a page.
Here are the 4 patents that were assigned to Google in the transaction:
Dynamic content conversion Invented by Eliyahu Marmor Assigned to Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. United States Patent 7,987,293 Granted July 26, 2011 Filed: April 10, 2006
Abstract
A method of display modification in a client server web system, comprising, intercepting, by a web intermediary, a response to a client request, sent by a server in response to the request, the response including client side active content adapted to execute at a browsing software on a client computer; replacing at least one display-related code section in said response by a wrapper section that includes code for modification of at least one display element and code for executing the original display-related code section; and executing said wrapper section as client side active content at said client to generate a display, modified from a display that would have been generated by executing the response.
Configuration setting Invented by Eliyahu Marmor US Patent Application 20070055739 Published March 8, 2007 Filed: April 3, 2006
Abstract
A method of defining customization for electronic content retrieved over an electronic connection (100, FIG. 1), which retrieves electronic content from a remote server (110) to a local client (102); edits the content at the local client by a user using a WYSIWYG editor, wherein AUTHORIZED USER REQUEST PAGE 202 said editor is a standard software used for displaying of content and wherein said editing does not require installation of software requiring user authorization; and automatically generates at least one customization definition based on said editing, said customization definition suitable for automatic applying to said content.
Non-intrusive digital rights enforcement Invented by Eliyahu Marmor Assigned to Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. United States Patent 7,167,925 Granted January 23, 2007 Filed: August 28, 2001
Abstract
A method for transferring information between a server (24) and a client (28), through a converter (22), comprising: analyzing at least a portion the information by the converter (22), to determine a standard used by the server (24) to encode the information in the portion; and replacing at least a portion of the analyzed information with other information, which other information uses a second standard, wherein, analyzing comprises parsing the information on a syntactic level and wherein the information comprises at least one Internet hypertext document.
Automatic conversion system Invented by Eliyahu Marmor Assigned to Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. US Patent 6,601,108 Granted July 29, 2003 Filed: April 12, 1999
Abstract
A method for transferring information between a server (24) and a client (28), through a converter (22), comprising: analyzing at least a portion of the information by the converter (22), to determine a standard used by the server (24) to encode the information in the portion; and replacing at least a portion of the analyzed information with other information, which other information uses a second standard, analyzing comprises parsing the information on a syntactic level and wherein the information comprises at least one Internet hypertext document.
Conclusion
When I read through these patents, I instantly thought of the Page Speed Proxy service that Google has set up, and how Google could potentially offer the services described in this patent as well.
It’s interesting that Google has acquired these patents at a time when NetMask seems to have just started really pushing the Web version of this service in the past few months. I’m not sure if Netmask is still in business, or if this transaction means that Google has effectively taken over the technology involved completely.
Fog Creek Software very recently experimented with Google’s Page Speed service, and provides a very detailed look at it in their post, Experiments with Google Page Speed Service. While there were some issues encountered the Page Speed service, the people at Fog Creek seemed pretty upbeat about the service, which remember is still in Beta.
Using the translation tools described in the patents could potentially make it much easier, faster, and more affordable to provide different language versions of sites, and the digital rights management aspect of the service could possibly help protect sites against some scrapers.