14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, US Patent and Trademark Office announced that a new patent was granted to Yahoo, a patent that was filled in September 1, 2000. The US Patent 7,146,416, "Web site activity monitoring system with tracking by categories and terms", is invented by Janet Yoo, Kian-Tat Lim, Stanley Ben Wong, and Elliott Yasnokvsky and assigned by Yahoo.
"A traffic monitor provides statistics of traffic using an activity input for receiving data related to activity on a server system. Events being monitored are binned by topic or term, where the terms are associated with categories. The categories can be a hierarchy of categories and subcategories, with terms being in one or more categories.
The categorized events include page views and search requests and the results might be normalized over a field of events and a result output for outputting results of the normalizer as the statistical analyses of traffic," it is mentioned in the patent description.
"The Yahoo Patent looks at how to measure the buzz around categories, topics, and terms from their use at the Yahoo Portal. This patent had me wondering how Yahoo presently measures trends in topics searched for on their search engine and portal, selected in their directory, and from people's usage of the many services they offer; and how the company might be analyzing and using that information," said Bill Slawski from Search Engine Land.
Yesterday, Yahoo published a press release to announce that the company is planning an internal reorganization that is meant to boost the number of customers. Today, they said that a new patent to improve the search engine was granted so, we should expect for new changes soon. It looks like Yahoo is fully prepared to challenge Google, a battle that can only bring us new products with an increased performance.