Poll: Do you think Google will sue MS over infringement of PageRank patent?

3 points by amichail 17y ago ↗ HN

Google and Bing rankings are suspiciously similar, at least for common queries. If Bing continues to attract market share, do you think Google would sue Microsoft over potential infringement of the PageRank patent?

5 comments

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amichail 17y ago ↗

According to Wikipedia, the PageRank patent is assigned to Stanford University. Can Google still sue?

zitterbewegung 17y ago ↗

Yea this brings the point that PageRank could have been licensed from Stanford to Microsoft at some time in Bing development and as long as they don't infringe on the google trademark they should be fine.

amichail 17y ago ↗

According to Wikipedia, Google has exclusive license rights on the patent.

What if Stanford University is not interested in suing MS but Google is?

gtani 17y ago ↗

MS published BrowseRank, IANAL but it sounds different

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/08/browserank-ranking-pages...

noodle 17y ago ↗

it would be a ridiculously costly coin flip, and i don't think microsoft would sue google over anything equally questionable, either.