Google acquires patents disappeared Cuil search engine

One of the grayer aspects of the technology sector, in my view, is the world of patents , in the end, they end up becoming missiles from one company to another when confronted in the courtroom. One of the consequences of takeovers is the sum of the patents that the company had just purchased, which also occurs when a company is liquidated and sold these assets. Indeed, Google has done with the last assets that had gone searching Cuil , which closed a year and half ago, obtaining patents owned.

Cuil was a search engine went live on July 28, 2008 at the hands of three former employees of Google (Anna Patterson, Russell Power and Louis Monier) and a former employee of IBM (Tom Patterson) who joined together to develop a search engine that offered many more results than the competition. In the end, despite good intentions, September 17, 2010 the service closed its doors.

Google has done with the seven patents that Cuil had registered and that revolved around user interface and improved search results when keywords or phrases have multiple meanings. And although one might think that Google has acquired patents on search algorithms to improve the performance of its search engine, Cuil patents focus on the only user interface and presentation of information.

Interestingly, from the close of Cuil in 2010, Anna Patterson Google returned to work in a management position in a time interval in which we have seen how the user interface of the Google search engine has changed and which have added images, news or social mark that leaves Google + search results.