Two years ago, September 2004, to be exact we started work on our first patent filings. There ended up being four of them. As you may already know, Enquisite reports only represents at most 10% of what’s actually covered in the original filings. There’s a lot more which we’ve not yet tackled. Enquisite’s patents revolve around search engine algorithms and advertising network algorithms, user intent; how to discern it, and how to account for it. A while ago, someone asked me the famous question “how big are your patents,” to which, my response was “about the size of a phone book.” Not the answer this individual was looking for (of course). In fact, I was quite wrong, they’re 2x the size of a phone book!

Anyhow - this Labor Day weekend, I literally woke up in the middle of the night while at our cabin at the lake with a series of ideas which coupled together would effectively combat Click Fraud. The click fraud detection tool works on an individual site basis, but can be plugged in directly to an advertising network for fighting fraud net wide. What’s cool is that it’s completely different from other solutions out there. It even takes into account situations both where individual systems are perpetuating click fraud, and where networks are using game theory strategy to organize / use subterfuge to perpetuate the fraudulent behavior.

After filing, I spoke at length with Andrew Goodman about the concepts, and bounced some ideas off him. In passing I also mentioned the idea that we’ll likely be adding a general analytics tool to the Enquisite offering.

We’ve started working out ways to implement areas of the patent filing for Enquisite users. It will be an ancillary product added on to the present Enquisite offering in the New Year. There’s an advantage for you to get going on Enquisite now for this feature: we’ll be able to help you spot historical problems for you. In other words, start using Enquisite today, and as we roll out the Click Fraud tool, you’ll not only be able to benefit from that day forward, but also be able to look back historically. That’s powerful, and not traditional.

Anyhow, now that the initial documents have been written and filed, I’ve identified a few independent patents claims within the larger concept, it looks to be big. This brings me to the second part of the post. Looking at the picture of the stack of papers that comprises filing #1, I happened to have the initial outline of filing #2 on my desk earlier. So far, it’s much smaller than a telephone book!  but that won’t last.

I’ll let you know what it really looks like in a few months, once I get the rest of the official filings.

In case you missed it, there was a minor Enquisite update ten days ago. Among other things we added in drill down capability for various Google Syndication outlets, such as Universities using Google as their search tool. We already reported this data previously, just now we broke it out.

More updates on the way, but I just wanted to keep everyone abreast.