Nonetheless, let me point out some general knowledge for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with patent law.

First, a published patent application is not the same as a patent–it’s like a paper that’s been submitted for publication but not vetted by the reviewers. There is no presumption of validity, and the application may ultimately be rejected by the patent office.

Second, a patent cannot validly assert to cover any material that was previously disclosed by others, whether in patents, literature, web sites, software, etc. Invalid patents sometimes get through the system because the patent office is far from perfect, but the demonstration of prior art is an effective (though sometimes expensive) means of invalidating such patents.

Third, I’m not aware of any instance where Google has lost a patent infringement suit. I suspect they have good lawyers and a predisposition to win rather than settle lawsuits, since they are an obvious target with deep pockets, and they don’t want to establish a precedent of being an ATM for patent trolls.

Frankly, I am getting a Déjà vu effect while going through the “Google Squared” application because it appears to be very similar in function to my United States patent application which was filed on April 12, 2007 and as publicly disclosed by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 16, 2008, when the patent application was published.

My patent application is titled as “Method And System For Research Using Computer Based Simultaneous Comparison And Contrasting Of A Multiplicity Of Subjects Having Specific Attributes Within Specific Contexts” bearing Document Number “20080256023” and Inventor name “Nair Satheesh” which may be viewed at http://patft.uspto.gov/ upon Patent Applications: Quick Search.

Google Squared appears to be using at least some if not many of the same methods and systems as set forth by me more than two years ago in my patent application. In fact there are many more methods and systems disclosed in my patent application which I believe will help resolve certain inaccuracies found in current Google Squared application.

I have issued legal notices to Google through my Patent Attorney in the US but Google has not responded yet to any of my notices.

As for my own aspirations to take on web search, I do read my own posts. If I were to take on this space, I’d start by kicking ass on one task where Google falls short. But I’m not ready to quit my day job to take that on!

@Daniel (sorry a bit off-topic but) latest developments of Yahoo BOSS, Google Squared and Microsoft Bing makes you excited to create a consumer SE?

As for Newssift, I appreciate the heads up and will forward the suggestion to the team working on it.

Slightly Off Topic:
Believe it or not I think squared is a response (a bit preemptive) to what others including Evri, Newssift but especially Microsoft is doing. I know, sacrilege to suggest Google is following a Microsoft “lead” but it’s the feeling I get… Additionally I think there’s a change in the face internally at Google and the control cabal are throwing a bone to some of their HCIR advocates rather than having them walk.

Totally Off Topic (Note for Daniel):
I love Newssift (plugging it all the time) but what ever their using on the back-end to go from HTML2Text needs to be improved, there’s a lot of unrelated entities getting into the guided navigation because they are being carried forward in the scrape rather than dropped. For example a story about Google Squared in a general news post may have links to other unrelated stories at the bottom which also contain Named Entities and these entities are getting into the Guided Navigation (and they should NOT). It’s possible to fix this though.

@daniel: But hey.. you had Norvig comment here on your blog. So I’m sure they’re at least listening.

I think I might have to start eating some of my words, about how Google is so focused on simplicity, that they can’t take a step out of that local maximum into something better.

Unfortunately, Googlers rarely comment on blogs, let alone on mine. I’d love to hear what they have to say to a group of HCIR enthusiasts about it.

quite fun.