"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.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:19:10 PDT