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.
"There should be broad interest in these patents because of Yahoo’s Internet pioneering history, they
encountered a lot of Internet functions and problems at scale that required innovation earlier than many others," he said. Their patent portfolio should be strong relative to others given when they
peaked."
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.