The director of SEO research for Go Fish Digital, Bill Slawski, published a list of the top ten search engine patents to know from 2019. This list touches on various sectors of search, such as Google News, local search knowledge graphs and more. It gives folks a peek at the technology that Google is, or what it could be one day, using to generate search results.
Most of the patent list pertains to what Slawski has categorized as knowledge-based patents.
One patent is on user-specific knowledge graphs to support queries and predictions. According to what Google said last year, “there is very little search personalization” happening within its search result rankings, Even though the patent was filed back in 2013, there was a recent whitepaper from Google on personal knowledge graphs touches on many of the same points.
Another patent, one using quality visit scores from in-person trips to local businesses to influence local search rankings, was filed in 2015 but granted in July 2019.
In one of Google’s ads and analytics support pages, the use of such quality visit scores was mentioned, as well as the company may award digital and psychical badges to the most visited businesses, and designating them as local favorites, Slawski said.
Google’s automatic query pattern generation patent was also highlighted by Slawski, and evaluates query patterns in an attempt to extract more information about the intent of a search beyond whether it is informational, navigational or transactional in nature.
“That Google is combining the use of query log information with knowledge graph information to learn about what people might search for, and anticipate such questions,” Slawski wrote in his post, “shows us how they may combine information like they do with augmentation queries, and answering questions using knowledge graphs.”
If you want to see the full list of search engine patents to know from 2019, head to Slawski’s original post on SEO by the Sea.