AltaVista to become only Net search engine
Patents
1/18/2001; 8:54:18 PM

'AltaVista may have a crap search engine (did we say that?) but in these days of corporate-owned Internet that doesn't matter. It's patents and lawsuits that decide what we can get on the global "free-market". And if it's patents you want, AltaVista has got a few. Thirty-eight in fact, and more on the way.

'So what? Well, Internet World magazine has just run an interview with the chairman and CEO of AltaVista's parent company, CMGI, David Wetherell in which he said the company would be pursuing its search engine patents and we can expect lawsuits coming this quarter.'

Oh, boy!

'In case you were wondering what patents AltaVista has, they include: indexing duplicate records of information of a database; parsing, indexing and searching Web pages; mapping an index of a database into an array of files; ranking documents "in a hyperlinked environment using connectivity and selective content analysis"; searching an index; optimizing entries for searching an index; and storing an integrated index of database records.'