I believe that's what I implied.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22google+sues%22+patent
Do you have some reason to think otherwise apart from that it would be bad business sense in your opinion?
In other legal protection (that is non-patent) they've sued everyone from the US Government (over their supposed favouring of Microsoft), Microsoft over the default search engine in IE 7, Froogle over trademark infringement as well as a whole bunch of counter suits.
If I go past the first five pages (which are dominated by Lodsys and Oracle limiting the space for other stories) who knows what else but I really don't have time.
Google are a big company, they have legal muscle and use it, please don't kid yourself it's otherwise.
Google said it wants a court ruling that its Google Maps feature doesn’t use inventions patented by closely held Traffic Information LLC. It’s also challenging the validity of the patents.
They aren't using patents - they are asking for a patent that can be used to attack them to be invalidated.
But the reality is that they do use legal muscle where it works and there have been other companies who've stated that they only bought patents for defensive purposes who soon shifted. I honestly can't see Google holding that line - you may disagree but only time will tell who is right.
I'd also suggest that Google's lack of use of patents in this way so far is likely as much down to the fact that they have a notoriously weak patent portfolio (estimated to be one twenty fifth the size of Microsoft's - largely a function of age rather than intent). Google suing another large company would be taking a knife to a gun fight.
I wonder if they'll decide to do a shakedown on Bing for using the patented PageRank method? Again, probably not.
Last time they talked about it[1], it used a neural network that appeared to be have ended up with a system similar to Kleinberg's Hubs and Authorities algorithm[2].
Your point is valid though.
[1] Back in the MSN Search days: http://www.seochat.com/c/a/MSN-Optimization-Help/Search-Engi...