Web Search–Google
A Couple of Google Briefs
Web Search
1) Where in the World is Steve Lawrence?
Yesterday, I mentioned that Gary Flake, formerly of NEC Research, was now chief scientist at Overture working to bring their newly acquired search technologies together. We can now confirm a former colleague, co-author, and another big name in information retrieval, Steve Lawrence, is working at another web search company, Google.
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2) Be Careful If You Use Google as a Verb
From the Detroit News, “When your search engine becomes ubiquitous — and it has a cool name — this is bound to happen: The American Dialect Society has voted the term “to google” as the most useful word of 2002. Naturally, in this age of lawyers, patents and nearly perpetual copyrights, the folks at Google — the search engine — have sent letters and orders directing that ‘googling’ — the newly-minted verb — is off limits.” I wonder if Kleenex, Jello, or Xerox will come after me. (-: Actually, it’s of sad that Google IS web search and research for many people but it once again reflects the poor marketing in the age of the Internet that traditional research (libraries and information vendors) have done. You can read the full-text of Google’s letter here.
See Also: Barbara Quint’s 2002 Article, “”Google: (v.)…” . This article was published about one year ago.
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3) Google Awarded Patent
Awarded yesterday, “Ranking search results by reranking the results based on local inter-connectivity” The inventor listed on the patent is Krishna Bahrat. Mr. Bahrat is also the primary developer of Google News. Stanford University was assigned the U.S. Patent for PageRank.

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