Lycos has patent on spider technology

[Nick Arnett]

At 09:55 AM 6/10/98 -0700, Andrew Wohrley, Science & Technology Referen wrote:
>A news item just stated that Lycos has just been granted a patent on 
>spider technology for searching the web.
>
>This sounds like it would have a fairly dramatic impact on Alta 
>Vista, Excite, Inktomi, etc.

Not at all.  Here's the abstract.

>A method of constructing a catalog of files stored on a network comprised 
of a plurality of interconnected computers each having a 
>plurality of files stored thereon. The method is accomplished by 
establishing a queue containing at least one address representative of a file 
>stored on one of the interconnected computers, ranking each address in the 
queue according to the popularity of the file presented by the 
>address, downloading the file corresponding to the address in the queue 
having the highest ranking, processing the downloaded file to 
>generate certain information about the downloaded file for the catalog, 
adding to the queue any addresses found in the downloaded file, and 
>determining the popularity of file represented by the addresses in the 
queue according to how often a file is referenced by a computer other 
>than the computer on which the file is stored.

Basically, it only affects the order in which they gather and index the
files. There are other ways to do it and they'd have a very hard time
knowing what order their competitors use.

This is *not* a patent on spiders; it is just one technique that they can use.

Nick
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