Cisco Files to Patent to Enter the Search Engine Business
Editor’s Note: Here’s a novel idea, maybe there are websites that people want to be private and if they wanted the search engines to know about them then they would let them know. I think Cisco is making a pretty big assumption here. I would rather see the search engines themselves deploy this gear in their datacenters and use it for people doing searches on their indexes and use that data to do inclusions if at all. But I would not like to see this as a new standard deployed everywhere.
One of the limitations of search engines such as Google (GOOG) or Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing that crawl the web looking for links is that they can only tell you about what they’ve finally come upon. That still leaves vast amounts of material as yet to be “discovered.” A patent application from Cisco (CSCO) suggests a clever way to help update the engines — and to make a manufacturer of network equipment an important part of yet another industry.