CMU files Lycos spider patent

Jim Whitehead (ejw@ics.uci.edu)
Wed, 3 Sep 1997 12:24:11 -0400


In the article, "Lycos loves its spider," Matthew Broersma of the ZDNet
News Channel
reports that Carnegie Mellon is seeking a patent on the web spider
technology used by the Lycos web crawler.

"It not yet clear how broad the patent is, but it is possible that other
search engines might now have to license some technology from Lycos."

http://www5.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/zdnn/0902/zdnn0012.html

However, I thought there were other Web spiders which predate Lycos, and I
know there was a WWW conference paper on Fielding's MoMspider, so I wonder
how they are making their claims to avoid prior art concerns.

- Jim