Let me preface this post by saying I’m not a lawyer.
Now to the meat: A patent has recently been awarded to Get The Job.com via their recent acquisition of EmployOn regarding the process of aggregating job content. Click here to see the entire application on file at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.
Typical of these documents, it’s long, wordy and relatively boring. For those of you, like me, who wish for a CliffsNotes version of this stuff, here’s my feeble attempt at a quick summary:
The present invention builds on the technology of job spidering and aggregation and incorporates it into the employment field. For example, the working set of web sites which this system spiders includes the entire Internet directory (”Dot Com database”). Thus, both companies and job boards are included in the job posting collection. Furthermore, the use of spidering technology is extended to resume collection as well as spidering of job postings. This allows the creation of a much more comprehensive and complete database of the available employment data.
If this patent represents a strong, legal case regarding the spidering of job content across the Web – and I believe it does – then a lot of people with a lot of money have reason for concern. Aside from the usual suspects, this also includes Yahoo! HotJobs. (Interestingly, because Google Base accepts content, as opposed to spidering it, they’re out of the woods.)
If there are any lawyers in the house who could shed some light on this patent, it would be greatly appreciated by me, as well as the entire community. In the meantime, I’m trying to schedule an interview with Get The Job.com president Chris Amato for the skinny.
Brief conversations with Jobster’s Jason Goldberg and Indeed’s Paul Forster revealed their awareness of the patent, but a lack of awareness to its specifics. If any head of any vertical search engine or job site wishes to comment on the patent, please feel free. The future of vertical job search may hang in the balance.
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July 13th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Geez, they dish out patents for anything! I get annoyed by some of these patents trying to own every possible idea. Its gotten out of hand with internet related patents.
What does this patent say about vertical search overall. Is every possible vertical in danger? Where does the patent office draw the line on what is patent material? Yikes.
PS… GettheJob looks strangely like the old Jobster. I think Jobster should patent that map on the homepage, they did it first.
July 14th, 2006 at 5:00 am
Hey, Joel:
I read this interesting just-published article in Business Week. It’s called: Friendster’s Patent Possibilities: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2006/tc20060713_163728.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_today’s+top+stories
Thoughts?
Amitai.
July 14th, 2006 at 10:52 am
Joel, I’m not a lawyer either nor experienced with patent law but after reading that i’d be astonished if it ever became a factor in our industry.
as far as prior art goes, there was a search site spidering and doing aggregation back around ‘99… do you remember it? jobsearchengine or something like that.
I did some research for a patent i filed a couple years ago (waste of time i’m sure) and noticed that careerbuilder owns a patent on the job board itself. have a look:
Employment recruiting system and method using a computer network for posting job openings and which provides for automatic periodic searching of the posted job openings
Abstract
A method and apparatus for providing an interactive computer-driven employment recruiting service. The method and apparatus enables an employer to advertise available positions on the Internet, directly receive resumes from prospective candidates, and efficiently organize and screen the received resumes. The method and apparatus further is capable of monitoring employment advertisements for a job seeker and automatically notifying the job seeker when a position for which the job seeker is suitable becomes available. The method and apparatus further enables a plurality of companies to advertise job positions at a single location accessible via the Internet by a job seeker, and enables the job seeker to communicate directly with a company via the Internet if the job seeker is interested in exploring further information pertaining to an available position at that company.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=2&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=careerbuilder&OS=careerbuilder&RS=careerbuilder
July 14th, 2006 at 8:57 pm
Don’t these patent officers have web access? Junglee was doing this in 1997… http://www.norvig.com/junglee/pr4.html