Patent Law

Richard Martin wrote an article in the February 11, 2008 print edition of Information Week titled, "The Search Market Fallout of Microsoft-Yahoo."

When tigers battle, mice get fat. That pseudo-Chinese proverb well describes one likely outcome of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s $44 billion bid for Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), which would reduce the top three Web search providers to just two: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Micro-Hoo (or whatever the mashup of Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN Live search tool would be called).

Below, far below, these consolidating giants is a proliferation of search upstarts, some of them providing consumer-oriented Web searches and some providing highly specialized forms of enterprise search. The clash of the titans atop the search pyramid is opening up new opportunities for these smaller players while helping to enable a broad flourishing of innovation in information-access technology.

The question the article provoked in my mind was, "How will this innovation benefit patent infringement investigations?"

Take Silobreaker, which debuted its contextual search engine at last month's Demo conference. Silobreaker provides search results optimized for current events, with added-value elements including "context extraction" (how the person or topic fits in with other people, institutions, or categories), geographical mapping, trend tracking (graphing numbers of mentions in the world press), and relational mapping (tracing relations between entities or people). The engine draws content on global issues, science, technology, and business from about 10,000 news, blog, research, and multimedia sources.

Silobreaker is being introduced as a free Web tool, but CEO Kristofer Mansson sees opportunities for use by large companies and government agencies--including those in intelligence. Mats Bjore, the company's director of business development, comes out of the intelligence world: He helped set up intelligence efforts involving publicly available data for the Swedish Armed Forces.

I have just recently tried Silobreaker and it has some very interesting features that I believe maybe useful additions.  Has anyone spent time using Silobreaker?  What about some of the others mentioned in the article, such as, Attivio, ChaCha and Eyealike?  Please provide your input by adding a comment.  The full Information Week article is available here.