New Patents for Google and Microsoft
Wednesday means it’s new patent day. Here are two patents that were awarded to Google and MS yesterday.

Title: Document compression scheme that supports searching and partial decompression
+ Assignee: Google
# 7,319,994

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates accessing a compressed representation of a set of documents, wherein the compressed representation supports searching and partial decompression. During operation, the system receives a search request containing terms to be searched for in the set of documents. In response to the search request, the system identifies occurrences of the terms in the set of documents by following pointers through the compressed representation. This compressed representation encodes occurrences of a term as a pointer to the next occurrence of the term to facilitate rapid enumeration of the occurrences of the term. Moreover, the compressed representation maintains sequential ordering between adjacent terms in the set of documents, which allows fast access to neighboring terms.

+ Title: Systems and methods for creating and displaying a user interface for displaying hierarchical data
Assignee: Microsoft
#7,320,113

A graphical user interface for displaying hierarchical data, such as extensible markup language (XML) data, in hypertext markup language (HTML) format in a convenient and efficient manner. For data having subordinate data, an actuatable subordinate data indicator is displayed on the user interface. When actuated, the subordinate data is displayed in a similar format as the parent data. Two methods are described for building the tables. A first method initially parses all the data and builds the necessary tables for display. A second method initially parses only the top level of data and then builds subordinate tables as they are requested by a user.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 and is filed under Intellectual Property, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.