Earlier this year, Google acquired the patents of a real time search engine started in 2009, Wowd (a play on the word “crowd.”) Wowd had no web crawlers, but rather relied upon users downloading a browser application, so that every page they visited was nominated to be included in search results. A Press Release from February, 2010 tells us about the search engine:
Wowd is a real-time search engine for discovering what’s popular on the Web right now. Unlike other engines in the space, Wowd focuses on discovery and exploration of the entire Web, i.e. surfacing trends, breaking news, social media topics, and popular pages. Wowd then taps into the “attention frontier” of its user community to build real-time search results. Wowd makes it easy to discover the latest trends, topics, and hottest Web pages.
In August of last year, Wowd released a search tool for Facebook, to add a number of features to the Facebook experience, including custom feeds, game spam blocking, and social search. A look at the Wowd website however tells us that “the team has decided to pursue new opportunities,” with some members of the engineering team joining Facebook. There’s no date on the message.
The patent filings are interesting, however. The execution date on the patent assignments was June 23, 2011, but the recording of the assignments didn’t take place until October 3, 2011.
It’s likely that Google has been following where you browse and what links you click upon in order to offer services such as personalized search in the past, but the Wowd approach appears to look at those clicks to find new and popular pages on the Web. Definitely worth spending some time with…
The first three include two continuation patents that build upon the first, and they share a common abstract…
System for User Driven Ranking of Web Pages Invented by Borislav Agapiev US Patent Application 20110106793 Published May 5, 2011 Filed: November 8, 2010
System for user driven ranking of web pages Invented by Borislav Agapiev Assigned to WOWD, Inc. US Patent 7,873,623 Granted January 18, 2011 Filed: April 13, 2010
System for user driven ranking of web pages Invented by Borislav Agapiev Assigned to WOWD, Inc. US Patent 7,716,205 Granted May 11, 2010 Filed: October 29, 2009
Abstract
Linked documents are ranked by observing link selections for referred documents from referring documents and counting such selections. The counts for each of the link selections are stored at various computer systems of a distributed network, a centralized collection of computers connected through a local network, or a hybrid system (collectively, the “system”) consisting of combinations of distributed and centralized systems, and processed (e.g., using a discrete probability distribution defined by the counts of the link selections) to obtain page ranks for the referred documents.
The link selections may be observed by a browser extension running on individual ones of the computer systems of the distributed network and the counts of the link selections may be stored at locations within the system determined by a distributed hash table. Search request results may be displayed in a ranked order as determined by the page ranks.
System and Method for Recommendation of Interesting Web Pages Based on User Browsing Actions Invented by Marko Svaic US Patent Application 20110106796 Published May 5, 2011 Filed: October 29, 2009
Abstract
Recommended Web sites are presented in response to a user visit to a Web site, a history of previous user visits to Web sites, or a user-initiated search query. The Web sites that are recommended are those deemed most similar to the subject Web site or to the results of the search query, as appropriate. Information regarding Web sites is retrieved from locations within a distributed system as identified by a distributed hash table and similarity assessments between the subject Web site or query responses and those Web pages may be made according to that information, as periodically updated.
The next two patent filings include a continuation patent as well, and they share a common abstract:
DHT-based distributed file system for simultaneous use by millions of frequently disconnected, world-wide users Invented by Borislav Agapiev and Igor Kabiljo US Patent Application 20110106758 Published May 5, 2011 Filed: April 12, 2010
DHT-based distributed file system for simultaneous use by millions of frequently disconnected, world-wide users Invented by Borislav Agapiev and Igor Agapiev Assigned to WOWD, Inc. US Patent 7,716,179 Granted May 11, 2010 Filed: October 29, 2009
Abstract
Content items in a distributed system are defined by a respective key, and each such content item is copied to R1 computer systems of the distributed system which have unique identifiers closest to a value of the respective key, where R1 is less than R2 which is less than R3, at least R2 number of the computer systems have copies of any respective one of the content items for all of the content items, and none of the computer systems farther than R3 in an address space of the distributed system have a copy of the subject content item. Modifications of individual content items are synchronized across all instances thereof responsive to a put operation and/or at periodic intervals.
Conclusion
Yesterday I wrote about a patent filing from Yahoo! that described how they may be crawling social media streams to find new and “recency-sensitive” pages. The Wowd approach would also be a way to find new pages and topics that might be very timely and topical. I would have suspected that Google might have already tried to do something similar in the past, but having patents that describe the process could be useful.
Google already collects data from toolbar users and people signed into Google Accounts to “improve the search experience” or through cookies. The Google privacy policy tells us in the section on cookies that:
When you visit Google, we send one or more cookies to your computer or other device. We use cookies to improve the quality of our service, including for storing user preferences, improving search results and ad selection, and tracking user trends, such as how people search. Google also uses cookies in its advertising services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web and on Google services.
I’ve seen many speculations over the years that Google also uses toolbar data to discover new pages on the Web, and the Wowd patents make it clear that is how Wowd discovered new pages.
This is an interesting group of patents, from their approach to distributing crawling of web pages by people with the application installed, to ranking “fresh” or “popular” recent pages, to the recommendation system Wowd has developed. It’s possible that Google may have purchased these patents to protect some of the things that they may have already been doing or were planning on doing, or that they may implement some of the technologies described within the acquired patents.
Added 2011/9/10 at 9:10 et – more on the back story behind this patent acquisition at: Wowd Assets Split Up Among Three Companies, Including Facebook. It looks like 7 of the Wowd engineers ended up at Facebook, and part of the terms of the sale of the patents to Google included licensing the technology to Facebook as well.