Bill Slawski compiled the list of patents on Search Engine Watch. Google, in addition to having the most, had one of the more interesting applications. As Slawski wrote, “It’s the first patent filing I’ve seen that includes island resorts, shopping malls, and chinese restaurants as part of the Exemplary System Architecture.’”

The title of the patent mentions “dynamic promotional offers such as coupons and advertisements,” but a much wider array of meanings and applications is implied. “Imagine shopping kiosks at your local shopping mall that can be used as part of this system, you have part of the broader picture in place,” Slawski said.

Another Google filing describes “new, more efficient ways to collect product reviews from the Internet, aggregate reviews for the same product, and provide an aggregated review to end users in a searchable format.” It doesn’t appear to be anything revolutionary, but it could be useful.

A Yahoo patent is for “a system and method for enabling information providers using a computer network such as the Internet to influence a position for a search listing.” As to how that influence comes about, “the network information provider influences the position for a search listing through a continuous online competitive bidding process.” Slawski, in much plainer language, notes that the patent “appears to describe the pay-for-performance search advertising process presently in place on Yahoo.”

In my humble opinion, these were the most interesting patents, but as mentioned earlier, the entire collection can be viewed at Search Engine Watch. Google had three patents in this period, Yahoo had two, and Microsoft, AOL, IBM, and Become Inc. all scraped by with one apiece

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One of Yahoo’s patent applications is related to its recent string of patents on “search unit”-type technology. This latest one recognizes that when users enter a two-word query, the words may not represent a single concept; they may just be two keywords.

The process described in this patent application would detect when a user deletes one of those words and then searches again. Yahoo would then try to “return targeted ads related to the more relevant term or terms along with the search results.”

One of Google’s patent applications indicates the company is trying to clean up its Gmail service. The technology would scope out the links in incoming e-mails, and if they led to a spam site, the e-mail itself would be classified as spam.

Microsoft filed for a self-explanatory patent called “Searching electronic program guide data.” Go Daddy requested a patent named “Email filtering system and method,” which, like the Google patent, would inspect links within messages. And Xerox filed for a patent for a system that might use “the search history of the user or others to refine the results of searches.”

You can read about this week’s other patent applications at SearchEngineWatch, where a list is compiled.

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The sole patent granted to Google this week is intended to speed up searches. It follows a number of recent patents involving search integration with mobile devices and languages that don’t utilize alphabetical characters, however, so the leading search engine company isn’t resting on its laurels.

One of IBM’s patents involves technology that would weed out certain search results. Titled “Administration of search results,” it allows users to exclude specific pages, as well as pages linking to or from the original address. The other patent was for “System, method, and service for using a focused random walk to produce samples on a topic from a collection of hyper-linked pages.”

The two patents granted to Yahoo deal with the categorization of concepts and building taxonomies of those concepts. The titles are fairly descriptive of their intended purposes: “Automatic generation of taxonomies for categorizing queries and search query processing using taxonomies” and “Search processing with automatic categorization of queries.” These link with a number of patents Yahoo has received lately, all relating to searches as based on concept units.

Microsoft also got a patent related to search concepts. Another one of its patents was called “System and method for customization of search results.” This technology would allow users to choose what sort of information would appear on the search engine’s results page. Microsoft’s other patents this week were for a “System and method for video browsing using a cluster index,” and “Block importance analysis to enhance browsing of web page search results.”

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.