Looks like Google and IBM are working together again to build up Google’s patent portfolio, from an update at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent assignment database. Details beyond the actual patents involved aren’t known yet. The last couple of times I wrote about large patent transactions between Google and IBM this past July and September, Google ended up sending out emails a few hours after my posts to a number of large media sites such as the New York Times, Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal, and a number of others disclosing the acquisitions. We’ll see if they do that again.

The last week of 2011, Google acquired 188 granted patents and 29 published pending patent applications from IBM, according to the USPTO assignment database, with an execution data on the assignment of the patents on December 28, 2011, in a deal that was officially recorded at the patent office on December 30, 2011.

The patents cover a broad range of topics, such as presentation software, blade servers, data caching, server load balancing, network performance, video conferencing, email administration, and instant messaging applications. A number of the patents cover specific internet, phone, and mobile phone technologies as well.

I pulled out a few patents that appear to involve web and telephone and mobile applications from their titles, including a java script browser widget patent, but there may be more patent filings on those topics that don’t have very descriptive titles.

Google has been assigned a large number of patents from IBM in the past through a number of different transactions, many of which I wrote about here, such as:

The USPTO database doesn’t include the terms of the acquisition such as the financial details, and neither Google nor IBM have disclosed those types of details publicly for their previous patent transactions.