A patent portfolio related to keyword advertising and conventional search will be auctioned off on March 31st, 2011 in New York City. The patent portfolio discloses a content-based method that enhances conventional search. This portfolio will be available at ICAP Ocean Tomo’s upcoming Spring 2011 Live IP Auction March 31st in New York City.
The collection of patents that will be auctioned off disclose the following:
— A content-based method that enhances conventional keyword based advertising approaches produced by a search query.
— This method displays online advertisements to users based on information provided by both the user and derived from the search engine results.
— The technique not only utilizes the keywords used in the user query, but the content from the search’s website results as well. From these sources, it identifies topics that are associated with matching advertisements and displays them to the user.
— This advanced, content-based process allows for more accurate targeted advertising than conventional methods.
— The technology in this patent lot organizes the search results into an aggregated content page, which can be mined to find topics, subjects, etc. that match against advertisements relating to such topics. By further relying on the search results, rather than just the query keywords, the displayed ads are more closely related to the needs and interests of the user.
— Early on in the user’s search, the user is presented with useful advertisements relevant to their intended search goal, as opposed to being presented ads that were bid on by advertisers and may be irrelevant to the user’s current search needs.
— This system improves the user experience by considering correlated topics such as related or complimentary services or products that are relevant to the current search.
— This technique benefits both customers and advertisers, ultimately increasing ad or site click-through rates and customer satisfaction levels. Moreover, it allows advertisers to more accurately test and measure the performance of advertisements.
— The applications also disclose that the tests to measure and rank ad performance can be modified based on the type of user, the time of day the advertisement is viewed, or the topics related to the search query.
— Advertisers using this method will be able to optimize their ad selection according to real user information and market needs.
It’s not very often that investors have an opportunity such as this to invest in a series of patents related to internet search. This method (the patents) were developed by John Nicholas and Kristin Gross Trust. From what I can tell, Kristin Goss Trust is named on two patents:
System and method of delivering RSS content based advertising
System and method for determining right of access
The second one appears to be pretty interesting, you can read it here:
>> url removed >>
System and method of delivering RSS content based advertising
A system and method is disclosed for presenting relevant advertising to user search queries. The RSS content is processed as part of a search query. The results of the query are further selectively processed to identify concepts/topics therein. The resulting web page topics/concepts can then be mapped to advertisements (or keywords) based on correlating topics/concepts which are in common. Thus the ads can be selected by reference to an underlying content presented in RSS feeds.