I am sure nobody, except lawyers, like to be sued over a silly matter. Google is that kind of company that wants to avoid all possible problems with the products they provide, so it's obvious they must assure against all kinds of potential lawsuits.

It seems like yesterday, the search engine giant decided to patent the design of their search result page, representing a safe way to avoid possible problems with a lawsuit.

Why is Google afraid of? Well, let's suppose you'll decide to patent the design of Google search results page. What's next? You can sue Google because they are using the patent without your approval and earn important money, or you can take it on the easy way and force the search giant to modify the appearance of their search result page.

"While this may seem silly, that's the state of software patents - patent an obvious or semi-obvious idea yourself, or expect to be sued by someone else who decides to try patent it (and sometimes, only a mixture of patents can force a stalemate situation against a competitor with an equal mix of patents in your space, kind of like the atomic bomb in the cold war)," Philipp Lenssen said.

In the patent number US D533,561 S, filed in March 26, 2004 and approved on December 12, 2006, Google claimed "the ornamental design for a graphical user interface", in other terms the design of the search result page.

The list of the inventors is huge, Google also publishing in the patent documents a simple scheme of the search engine's result page. If you want to see an image with the approved patent and with the design Google patented you can visit this link.