Re: Interview with David Wetherell of CMGI

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From: kragen@pobox.com
Date: Fri Jan 26 2001 - 12:49:51 PST


"Stephen D. Williams" <sdw@lig.net> writes:
> kragen@pobox.com wrote:
> > Lexis-Nexis's work is not useful for prior art invalidating
> > AltaVista's patents, though, as (a) they weren't spidering anything
> > and (b) they didn't publish.
>
> They weren't spidering? What about all those dialouts to magazines,
> newspapers, and court houses to download new data every night?

What about them? Dialing up a human-entered list of data sources to
get new data is a method of getting data, but that's all it has in
common with spidering the Web.

> They didn't publish? After you paid $35 to do a search, you then paid
> something for each document you viewed. Essentially they republished
> every single thing they took in. Sort of like Google's caching, only
> with spell checking and parts-of-document markup added.

They didn't publish their algorithms, so they are not useful as prior
art to invalidate patents.

Sorry my email was unclear.


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