A Rundown of Google Patents from the First Half of 2020

Want to discover all of the Google Search Patents of interest for the first six months of 2020?

Then read on. I’ve rounded them all up in this article for you.

I’ve categorized them to make it a bit easier for those looking to research in specific areas.

For those that already read patents, enjoy!

For those that have really never gotten into them, it might be a great time to start.

Understanding how search engines work is a huge advantage for any SEO professional.

It gives you a stronger sense of what might be happening and also to get a sense of where things might be going.

A bit of SEO “future-proofing,” if you will.

Google Assistant

• Implementations for voice assistant on devices
• Proactive virtual assistant
• Invoking an automated assistant to perform multiple tasks through an individual command
• Tailoring an interactive dialog application based on creator provided content
• Automated assistants that accommodate multiple age groups and/or vocabulary levels
• State-dependent query response
• Detecting and correcting potential errors in user behavior
• Systems, methods, and apparatus for providing image shortcuts for an assistant application
• Virtual assistant generation of group recommendations

Authorship

• Generating author vectors

Conversational Search/Voice

• Biasing voice correction suggestions
• Speech recognition with attention-based recurrent neural networks
• Speech endpointing based on word comparisons
• End of query detection
• Search-based dynamic voice activation
• Word-level correction of speech input
• Systems and methods for recognizing user speech
• Customizing actions based on contextual data and voice-based inputs
• Search-based dynamic voice activation
• Word-level correction of speech input
• Systems and methods for recognizing user speech
• Speech recognition and summarization
• Speech recognition with parallel recognition tasks
• Detecting and suppressing voice queries

Discover

• Selecting, ranking, and/or presenting microsite content

Entities

• Entity-based searching with content selection
• Structured entity information page
• Entity display priority in a distributed geographic information system
• Surfacing live events in search results
• Identifying a level of relevancy of a keyword cluster related to an event category for a given time period relative to the event
• Entity disambiguation in a mobile environment
• Selecting textual representations for entity attribute values
• Generating ranked lists of entities

Image Search

• Architecture for responding to visual query
• Digital supplement association and retrieval for visual search
• Systems and methods for locating image data for selected regions of interest
• Efficient image analysis
• Image search query predictions by a keyboard
• Images for query answers

Indexing

• Template-based structured document classification and extraction

Knowledge Graph

• Computerized systems and methods for enriching a knowledge base for search queries

Local

• Three-dimensional annotations for street view data
• Attaching visible networks for synchronous local search results
• Suggestion refinement
• Image retrieval with deep local feature descriptors and attention-based keypoint descriptors
• Attaching visible networks for synchronous local search results
• Automatic continued search

Machine Learning

• Multi-task learning using knowledge distillation
• Training distilled machine learning models
• Regularization of machine learning models
• Machine learning system and method of classifying an application link as broken or working
• Personal search result identifying a physical location previously interacted with by a user

Mobile

• Navigation queries
• Search engine

Natural Language Processing

• Generation of a topic index with natural language processing

Neural Networks

• Training a document classification neural network
• Complex evolution recurrent neural networks
• End-to-end text-to-speech conversion
• Category learning neural networks
• Processing images using deep neural networks
• Skimming text using recurrent neural networks
• Neural network processor
• Generating larger neural networks
• Determining orders of execution of a neural network

Personalization

• Detecting and correcting potential errors in user behavior
• Personal search result identifying a physical location previously interacted with by a user
• Discovery of unique entities across multiple devices
• Dynamic and personalized filtering of media content
• Personal search result identifying a physical location previously interacted with by a user
• Personalized search results

Predictive

• Predicting user needs for a particular context

Query Classification

• Query modification based on non-textual resource context
• Generating elements of answer-seeking queries and elements of answers
• Classification of offensive words
• Query suggestion templates
• Sentiment-based classification of media content

Ranking / Scoring

• Contextual ranking of photos and text in search
• Selectively modifying scores of youth-oriented content search results
• Scoring content based on social interaction
• Contextual ranking of photos and text in search
• Selectively modifying scores of youth-oriented content search results
• Information ranking based on properties of a computing device

Recommendation Engine

• Query refinements using search data
• Query completions

Searching

• Identifying teachable moments for contextual search
• Navigation system and methods for generating enhanced search results
• Determining search queries for obtaining information during a user experience of an event
• Performing multiple related searches
• System and method for improving access to search results
• Methods, systems, and media for presenting related media content items
• Synthesis of webpage snippets using sub-pages of the webpage
• Determining a set of steps responsive to a how-to query
• Enhancing sitelinks with creative content
• Television related searching
• Search engine
• Answer facts from structured content

Semantic

• Semantic model for tagging of word lattices

Social Networking

• Determining a quality score for a content item

Spam

• Detection of malware features in a content item
• Detection of malware features in a content item (refile)

Temporal

• Temporal content selection

Videos

• Providing an indication of highlights in a video content item
• Automatic detection of zones of interest in a video
• Generating theme-based videos
• Displaying information related to content playing on a device
• Methods, systems, and media for providing video content suitable for audio-only playback
• Detecting similar live streams ingested ahead of the reference content
• Conditional display of hyperlinks in a video
• Detecting multiple parts of a screen to fingerprint to detect abusive uploading videos
• Relevance-based image selection
• Methods, systems, and media for providing video content suitable for audio-only playback
• Methods and systems for person detection in a video feed
• Detecting actions to discourage recognition
• Systems and methods of person recognition in video streams

And that’s a wrap.

Next week, we’ll get back into the normal weekly awards with some analysis.

More Resources:

• A Personalized Entity Repository in the Knowledge Graph
• Does Google Use Sentiment Analysis to Rank Web Pages?
• Author Vectors: Google Knows Who Wrote Which Articles

Image Credits

Featured Image: Created by author, October 2020