Hello and welcome to our great, big, mega-post round-up of Google Search patents from 2020.
Throughout the year, I spend time collecting and writing about Google Search patents that are of interest to the SEO community. I also write about the interesting ones every now and again here on Search Engine Journal.
Now that we’ve made it to 2021 (thank goodness), I wanted to share the entire 2020 collection with you.
They’re grouped to make things easier and so that if you’d like to do some research in a particular area, you can dig in.
And that’s the thing, really — nobody reads these for fun! Well, I do, but I’m strange (so the missus tells me).
It’s all about trying to learn more about various aspects of information retrieval and Google’s algorithm. I hope you find it useful.
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
- Determining state of automated assistant dialog
Authorship
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
- Automated speech recognition using language models that selectively use domain-specific model components
- Recognizing accented speech
Discover
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
- Modeling personal entities on a mobile device using embedding
- Querying a data graph using natural language queries
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
Knowledge Graph
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
- Generation of enhanced search results
Links
- Personalization of web search results using term, category, and link-based user profiles
- Generating textual summary about physical location based on computing interactions pertaining to physical location
- Geocoding personal information
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
- Selecting content items using reinforcement learning
- Searchable index
- Machine learning to identify opinions in documents
- Searchable index
- Robotic grasping prediction using neural networks and geometry aware object representation
Mobile
NLP
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
- Robotic grasping prediction using neural networks and geometry aware object representation
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
- Personalization of web search results using term, category, and link-based user profiles
Predictive
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
- Detection of popular content with narrow appeal
Recommendation Engine
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
- Dynamic determination of filters for flight search results
- Generation of enhanced search results
Semantic
Social Networking
Spam
Temporal
Vectors
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
- Learning highlights using event detection
- Detection of popular content with narrow appeal
And there we have it.
Whew, what a workout!
Next up, I’ll be sharing some of the odd, non-search related patents Google was awarded in 2020. Just for fun.
Then we’re back on with the new Google Search Patents for 2021.
Stay geeky out there!
More Resources:
- 3 Latest Google Patents of Interest – October 13, 2020
- Google Search Patent Update – December 18, 2020
- A Rundown of Google Patents from the First Half of 2020
Image Credits
Featured image by author, January 2021
