Re: Interview with David Wetherell of CMGI

From: Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Date: Fri Jan 26 2001 - 08:51:34 PST


Stephen D. Williams writes:
> They weren't spidering? What about all those dialouts to
> magazines, newspapers, and court houses to download new data every
> night?

Missing at least one essential characteristic of web spidering; the
use of the resources being indexed to discover the locations of
*other* resources, which also get indexed, and so on, recursively.

Veronica did that, I believe...

> 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.

I presume Kragen meant that they didn't publish their *methods*.
One of the (nominal) purposes of the patent system is to encourage
publication, so, IIRC, trade secret methods don't count as prior art.

rst



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