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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

From the first page of results on the comparative Google search (ironically): Google Sues Oregon Company Over Patents for Online Traffic Maps: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a...

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.

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Did you read that first link?

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.

Sorry, my bad.

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.

There's nothing ironic about it. It's on the first page of Bing too. If you read the first line of what you linked to, you'll see that it has nothing to do with Google enforcing its patent rights.

I wonder if they'll decide to do a shakedown on Bing for using the patented PageRank method? Again, probably not.

Bing doesn't use PageRank.

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...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HITS_algorithm

Interestingly, at least on Win7 & IE8 it is impossible to set Google as your default search. All you can do it set it up as an "Accelerator", but that doesn't make it work with the search box. The search box appears to specifically ban Google.

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