Yahoo has set a mid-June deadline for preliminary bids on its patent sales -- many of which are related to Web search and advertising -- and hired the boutique investment bank Black Stone IP to run the auction, according to one report.
Digging a bit deeper into the types of search patents on the block, one in particular -- granted in January -- determines a method of local intent, a coveted focus for Google.
"Local intent may reflect whether a search query should receive results and advertisements that are geographically specific," describes the patent No. 9,262,439. "The local intent may be determined using probabilistic models that analyze historical searches to determine which search terms tend to have local intent."
Believe it or not, Yahoo has a long history of the U.S. Patent and Trademark officers granting the company's engineers innovative search patents like No 9,342,602, which analyzes user interfaces for search systems using inline contextual queries. Then there's No. 9,311,655, which details the display of location-related promotional message with search query results.
Some might believe that Google would have interest in acquiring the patent portfolio of about 3,000 related to search, advertising and ecommerce. After all, Google bought Motorola's patents to protect from patent litigation. Not so, says Precursor President Scott Cleland in a post.
"Au contraire, big antitrust vulnerabilities and a decade of Googlian hostility to the intellectual property rights of competitors effectively rule them out of this Yahoo auction," Cleland writes.
"Google, naturally, would love to acquire these patents to keep them out of the hands of others, but they have no one to blame but themselves for not being able to buy them without triggering huge blow and antitrust risk to Alphabet, Google, and Android," he told Search Marketing Daily.
The bidding on Yahoo’s patents would shine an antitrust spotlight on Google, and would attract attention to the company's "ignominious pattern of disrespect for the property of competitors and the bloody trail of intellectual property infringement lawsuits Google has uniquely provoked over the last fourteen years," per Cleland.
According to Cleland, Google was charged with anticompetitive abuse of Standard Essential Patents. It had to settle a claim with the FTC in 2013 and the EU in 2014, for ways that harmed consumers via higher prices, less choices and less innovation.
I don't believe that Cleland is correct. Google could bit on the patents then release them into the public domain. This would eliminate Anti -Trust concerns while at the same time mitigating a competitor from using those patents to lay claim to Google patents.