Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Wednesday Search Challenge (May 26, 2010) - Larry's first patent

Sometimes you think a problem is going to be dead easy, and it turns out to be more complicated than you'd expect.  


For instance, here's today's challenge... "What was the title of Larry Page's first patent?"  


You'd think this would be simple and straightforward.  (And maybe you'll find a simple way to answer this.)  But the way I did it was a little more complex than I thought it should be.  


What's YOUR solution? 

2 comments:

  1. First I had to figure out how to search just patents (Google Scholar doesn't have an obvious way to ask for patents only, so I had to infer from the links that there was a separate Google search engine for patents.)
    Next:

    http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=cJUIAAAAEBAJ&dq=%22lawrence+page%22

    Order by oldest to newest. Look visually for patents that are actually about Lawrence Page, and not, say, about "DH Lawrence Page 12". There was only one plausible hit, and it's patent number 6285999.

    Curiously, when I tried using advanced search with the inventor set to Lawrence Page, I couldn't bring it up...

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