This week the blogosphere is abuzz about a newly issued patent by Google (US Patent No. 7,836,391).

According to many commentators this patent covers placing a thumbnail image next to a search result.  Because the search engine Bing does this, some are saying that Bing may be infringing on the patent.

For example, over at The Next Web, there is speculation that Bing may be infringing on claim 5, which  recites,

5.  The search engine of claim 1, where the decision component is further to associate the thumbnail representation with the link to the particular document additionally based on a relevance score for the particular document being higher, by at least a threshold amount, than relevance scores for all other ones of the identified documents.

The only problem with this theory is that claim 5 is a dependent claim and includes every claim limitation from independent claim 1, including

….  a decision component to: rank the identified documents, calculate a click-through rate associated with each of the identified documents, and associate, with a link to a particular one of the identified documents, a thumbnail representation of the particular document in response to calculating that the click through rate associated with the particular document is higher, by at least a threshold amount, than the click through rates associated with all other ones of the identified documents.

Thus, to infringe Bing would have to calculate a “click-through rate” for the search and associate the thumbnail with the search result only if the click-through rate was higher than a certain predetermined click-through rate.  Because Bing is merely a search engine, it does not calculate a click-through rate when determining and presenting search results.  Thus, it is not seen how Bing would be infringing.

It appears that the above Google patent would be used as part of Google’s paid advertising model.

For similar faulty analysis, see Go Rumors.