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Comment by nickreese | Hacker News Reader

RedVentures is pretty much the 1000lb gorilla in SEO lead gen. They also have a pretty large patent library and aren't afraid to use it. This includes a patent on zip code search which our last startup was on the receiving end of an infringement claim.[1]

If you are a reporter or investigative journalist I'd encourage you to do some poking around into the business model behind APlaceForMom.com and the FTC action to spin off Caring.com and the overall effect on the nursing home industry.

I can go on a major rant about RV, their moves to rollup the majority of the lead gen industry but due to prior legal interactions with them I'll refrain from painting a target on my back any further than I have.

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[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20140149249A1/

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Google should technically blacklist most of their sites, they blatantly link to their own properties to boost the SEO ranking of all their online properties

The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part

> The fact Google is too lazy to stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet is the most disgusting part

It would make them somewhat hypocritical if they did.

In this case it makes their "product" worse because search quality is bad and only focused on exploiting Google's user. Google has an incentive to remove these companies for their own benefit even if you ignore basic ethics

Their product is the ad-section above the search results.

RV plays the game that Google created and they do it well. What’s wrong with that? Google doesn’t stop it because that’s how they make ad revenue. And I wouldn’t say monopolizing is the right term… that would imply we ran Google and made sure to make our results #1.

The entire company is just a giant PBN that is considered too big to fail/deindex.

What is PBN?

Private Business Network?

private blog network, old SEO trick where you have multiple websites that appear separate but are owned by the same person and link back to each other to boost SEO. Google bans the practice but all these huge media companies get away with it. If a small fry did it all their sites would be removed from Google

at their scale, I wouldn't be surprised if they had multiple people on Google Search team bribed. They'd lose billions if they actually got the penalties they deserve

Bribes most likely tied to stock, perhaps in part part "vesting" only at future date.

This comes across as conspiracy theorish, but sadly isn't if you consider Thumbtack/Nest? getting penalties & reversals within a week. Maybe it was a coincidence that they had GV investments? When a non-affiliated site gets penalized, Jon Mueller and Gary Illyes say "we can't 100% explain the algorithm's ranking decisions. Just publish more quality content", but when a GV company gets hit, Google acts quickly in rectifying the penalty.

The same for eBay's massive organic penalty after they published a case study showing that pausing their paid ads didn't hurt their business.

>stop a bunch of conglomerates from monopolizing the internet

Would Google make more money if they did this?

This is what is sad. During that time frame, BroadbandNow was 100% better (listing all providers vs just paying) than AllConnect. I didn't really know how large RV was until discovering their acquisition of Imagitas from the USPS, so they both have their tentacles everywhere & would rather litigate than innovate.

I've seen their job listings and looked them up from the employment side before, and they seem to have high turnover & somewhat cult-like/exploitative behaviors.

How can this be a patent? It’s as ridiculous as the one click buy. Don’t your legislators see how these things are not at all useful and are only used to bully? How they only create useless overhead? How it prevents progress and incremental innovation? How it induces fear into small businesses and creates perverse incentives for large ones?

I tried multiple times to understand what it is actually saying.

But between the vagueness and buzzwords I didn't get it at all.

I remember reading some piece of policy document that stated offhandedly in its introduction as a matter of fact something like "Patents allow us to foster innovation and are a benefit to society".

I can only imagine that businesses are going to setup somewhere outside the US. Not for tax reasons, but simply to avoid the exposure to the minefield of patent.

If you do business in the US, a US court can compel you to stop doing so, even if you're not there.

Except that these days they almost never do that.

With patent claims up to billions of dollars, "they likely won't enforce it" isn't good enough for most serious companies.

I’m not talking about enforcing an injunction. I’m talking about granting one.

A good example of their SEO content generation:

https://www.aplaceformom.com/sitemap

This websites also used the same website design:

https://www.allconnect.com/internet/cheap

This one is slightly different but same leadgen business model:

https://www.mymove.com/

Also with a coupon directory with affiliate links: https://www.mymove.com/coupons/electronics/

Couldn’t find any obvious cross links between properties. But definitely giant Google keyword engines with a leadgen business model.

RV employee here, so take this as you will but... this comment is baffling. RV does not own or operate A Place for Mom. One of the private equity firms that owns a stake in RV also has a stake in A Place for Mom. Not the strongest connection in the world. RV bought Bankrate, Inc in 2017 (the acquisition through which I joined RV, in another division) which owned Caring.com. Because of the investor connection, RV never integrated Caring and sold it off immediately. So, maybe the senior care industry has some awful practices. But... RV does not do business in that industry. This is really what you hold against us?

This was the FTC complaint that led to the sale of Caring.com https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2018/04/ftc-a...

Apparently APlaceForMom was #1 in the market and Caring.com was #2 and the FTC feared that having the same stockholders owning majority stakes in both companies would lead to data sharing and essentially be market consolidation.

So RV sold off their $1.4B investment.

You ignored the monopolist patent troll stuff and the part where the poster's company was sued by RV for zip code search, but yeah good summary.

In case any engineer reading the linked patent is confused about what the patent is saying ... that is a feature of the patent ... not a bug.

Patents are written to be vague. They don't need to teach anything. They just need to look "sophisticated" so a jury of yokels in rural Texas thinks that it's very "smart". Then you get an award of Billions of dollars for something you cook up on a whiteboard over lunch with your lawyer.

After seeing the breakneck pace of innovation in Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm convinced that a free for all is a better state for an economy then what we have in California with patents. Patents create a system where you need to get a thousand permissions from people ... spend millions on lawyers ... all for what? All because we are worried that someone somewhere might have done the thing you are trying to do first. I say so what? Yes its sad if someone makes something and they don't get paid for it because everyone else does the same thing. But is that a bigger tragedy then what we have now where trolls shut down whole industries and approaches? Where lawyers live parasitically on the backs of engineers, doing nothing but causing friction in the system and adding no value.

I know formerly good engineers that no longer do engineering. They just spit out endless amounts of bullshit papers for lawyers to turn into patents, which will then be used to harass those of us that are actually trying to build useful products.

A society that incentivizes parasitism instead of productive work will end up falling behind a society that incentivizes useful work.

Between the policies of the Fed that have pushed so many smart people into unproductive speculative jobs (like flipping houses) and stupid laws like software patents, I've become very bearish about America's future prospects after visiting China. Everyone in China actually seems to be working at a breakneck pace making useful stuff. Everyone in America seems to just have their hand in someone else's pocket, or they are buying some asset in the hope they can sell it for more tomorrow.

How can we continue to make progress like this? This is so insane.

That's not a patent. It's a published application, which was abandoned after being rejected by the USPTO. This can be verified on the USPTO's public PAIR system.

The broader point about yokels from rural TX is less true than it used to be. Post 2012, as a practical matter, to assert a patent, you have to survive an IPR challenge, where a group of more experienced technical staff at the USPTO decide whether the invalidate your patent in an adversarial proceeding.

I should add that the abandoned patent application is a continuation-in-part of two issued patents, if folks are curious: 8,433,617 and 8,346,624, both of which issued before the bar for software patents was raised (and blurred, to mix metaphors) in 2014 by the Supreme Court in Alice v. CLS Bank. Software patents issued before that case tend to not fare well under the current case law and are often thrown out in the first months of a suit (with a few exceptions in certain fora).

The yokels from rural TX problem got somewhat fixed in May 2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...

When I click on the link above it says that the current patent status is "Abandoned"?

I may have linked to the wrong one. They have 2 active owned via AllConnect patented by Glenn Goad. One is zip code availability lookup/search and the other is address level search for availability of services. They also have a 3rd more aggressive one that the patent examiner gave them headaches over and they ultimately abandoned.

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We were sued in 2018. My knowledge of their patents is from then. They may have abandoned some since then.

It sounds like it might be this one: https://patents.google.com/patent/US8433617B2/en

It's active and I see lawsuits were filed around it in 2018.

Thanks! That looks like the one. How do these patents make it through the "novel, unique, and non-obvious" evaluation process by examiners?

Regulatory capture and incompetence, par for course of industrial complexes - where lawyers make more profit via the most successfully, doing whatever dark patterns to earn more profit/extract more from society, then having more $ to pay lawyers, and it's also initially funded by VC industrial complex.

It's ultimately why I believe control mechanisms must be abandoned, no patents (or if allowed, perhaps only for 3-5 years to give a head start but longer than that is clearly harmful and costly to society and innovation/competition).

Examiners are overworked and under-resourced, and the current system gives too much latitude to filers, especially if you have resources to do many filings with many rounds of back and forth with the examiners.

I believe they cause more harm than good and we should just get rid of software patents. At most, they should be replaced with IP protection that's similar to software innovation timescales (ie, 1-2 years, not 20 years).

It seems like the cited patent was an application that was eventually abandoned. The application didn't hold very well during examination.

I would have thought that there would be prior art on that (zip / post code lookup) from US Postal Service or the GPO

Nick, I’m very sorry to hear of your troubles. I’d love to hear more about what our industry can do to shift the tide back towards serving those in need of care better. My mission is to maximize wellbeing, and it’s appears you are aligned with this perspective.

If you are an investigative journalist or class action lawyer, please feel free to reach out to me. I’m easy to find.

I appreciate you responding to this thread, but "My mission is to maximize wellbeing, and it’s appears you are aligned with this perspective" is a really fake, BS response.

If you want to engage with the HN community, talk about why you own and have prosecuted what seem like obvious patents. It was filed in 2009, when similar services were all over the web.

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