Diorex

Read through the Google Patent applications that Bill at SEO by the Sea found.

Other than being great reading material for insomniacs, this is the perfect example of a patent that should not be granted. Not being a patent attorney or even very familiar with any of this stuff other than Google’s PPC models.

To my reading this basically says that Google can rate something on any of 44 different factors and then determine if it is “good” or not. It can use those factors unevenly and the ultimate arbiter of good is its human staff.

So what I get from this is that Google can rate one of your competitors sites a score of 88 (factors can include everything from bid to history to user bias to what the rater ate for lunch) and another one of your competitors sites a 55. They then look for ways to algorithmically arrive at those numbers and then use that algorithm to arrive at your ranking.

The best way for Google to arrive at that algorithm may be entirely unknown, perhaps it is the number of obscure punctuation marks on a page or the use of latin words or perhaps a URL that can spell a Google dog’s name when the letter are rearranged.

In other words, nothing is clear about how Google arrives at this ranking. It is completely and totally arbitrary. Trust me - when it is arbitrary big spenders and big brands are going to get human review and the benefit of the doubt and the little guy is gonna get the bag.

With my limited understanding of the patent system, it was designed to foster the sharing of knowledge in return for offering protection for the person who developed and shared that knowledge. Google just took the kitchen sink and threw it into a patent application with the realistic hope the patent inspector would be clueless and grant google a license to regulate all future attempts at an intelligent ad ranking system.

Under the spirit of the patent process, I would read this disclosure and be able to say these are the 3 most important things to focus on, and here are 5 more that are of lesser importance. That is not in any way done. It is not even till like item 41 of 44 where I even saw words like bid or CTR or anything having to do with what is historically Google’s model. I did not read it that close, but many of the other 41 items were things I was not even sure what they were, other than the fact that I cleared the cookies on every computer I owned after I read it.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Google, PPC, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.