Well, it happened. I didn’t think it would come out so soon, but here it is: Google Patent Search. I expected it as it’s a natural application for Google technology and is well aligned with Google’s overall direction. The search interface looks somewhat lighter and easier than what you see on USPTO site. You can use the search form to enter the corresponding search words, but essentially the search string is a combination of keyword:value pairs.

What is significantly different in Google Patent Search is that now you can search full text of U.S. patents since 1790s. That’s approximately 7 million issued patents. Google did that by using the same technology that powers Google Book Search. Google has taken the entire image database of U.S. patents and extracted the plain text from all relevant sections of the patents. That has made full text search possible for patents that only existed as page images on USPTO.

The service is in beta. It may stay that way permanently though like many other Google services. Obviously there are features that are missing like the ability to print or save patents. And there are those little things that need to be ironed out as it matures. For one, mistakes made in character recognition. Sometimes P is recognized as an F. It could have been funny but in the end it makes finding relevant patents really difficult. Even without looking hard I’ve also seen B in place of E. Another is that words that are divided at the end of one line and continued on the next line of text cannot be found. It appears they’re not recognized as full words at all.

It’s interesting how Google presents the patents - the same way it does with books. You always get to see images of all pages of a patent. Also, you get bibliographic data and text of a patent when USPTO has it available. When you do full text search, the images you see have the search words highlighted. For old patents you don’t get the full text of a patent as USPTO does not have it. It’s obvious that Google does have the full text, does searches on it, and then generates the image with the highlights - yet not giving the full text out. That is because it is built on the platform of Google Book Search where they do not want to give away the text to avoid possible issues with publishers and right owners. I’m not convinced it should be the same way with patents though.

Does anyone know what technology Google uses for character recognition (OCR)?

It’s amazing how remote all things internet get when the internet is not at your fingertips. I moved to my home town in Russia for the time being, and now I don’t have the kind of access to the internet that I’ve became accustomed to. I am back to the internet as luxury from being used to having it as commodity. I am back to dialup at 44kbps, that’s what my laptop’s modem gives me.

Even though it’s dialup it’s not cheap, so I can’t spend as much time online as I would like. So I am changing my internet usage patterns. Downloading all email to my notebook from Yahoo! Mail and Gmail instead of reading it online. Writing emails offline, and then sending them all at once when I am online again.

Oh, and now blogs. Blogs are such pain in the ass, pardon my french. I simply don’t have the time online to read them, and that hurts a lot. I am using the R|Mail blog to email service now to get all blog entries in my email that is downloaded to my notebook, and then I read it all offline. Still, it’s not perfect at all. A blog entry in full is a rare species. Usually it’s a thing with a “more” link that you have to click on to read the complete entry. So the rest of the entry does not make it to my email. Oh well. I think you can feel my frustration now.

ADSL option is available where I stay, but it’s not cheap either. It’s $40-$45 for 64kbps link and 1Gb of incoming traffic, or $75 for 2Gb of incoming traffic. Outgoing traffic is not counted. You pay hefty installation fee and the cost of two ADSL modems, and in a little while you’re all set. Only it seems that I use about 10mb per hour while browsing or downloading my email on dialup, which gives me… about 100 hours of browsing before I run out of my prepaid ADSL traffic allotment. Forget about downloading something interesting.

I get nearly everything I used to read online in my mailbox now, with the exception of few forums that don’t have the RSS support. Another excepion is the wiki that I maintain. Often than not I have to go out and read the blog entries in full while online. That’s how I burn my dialup minutes at disturbing speeds. Everything moves fast on the internet, and I do need to know of happenings earlier, not later. Anyhow, it’s a very different setting from what I used to have in the States, but I’m getting used to this all. It will work out, eventually.

One thing I understand better now is why and how many people here don’t have that feel of the internet and its surroundings that inspires me and other people with new ideas and killer applications. They simply don’t feel the pulse of the internet.

I keep a lot of bookmarks around. I mean, a lot! That makes it difficult to manage them, and for that reason I became a fan of tags, and a user of del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking service. Now it’s much easier for me to find my bookmarks, and revisit places I’d been to on the net. I am talking of my personal bookmarks only, not the social aspects of having them on del.icio.us.

There are lots of other social bookmarking services now, each with its unique twist. The thing with most of them is that none are up to the level of convenience that I’d like to have. One thing I would like to have is a better interface, another is the ability to file my bookmarks faster, possibly skipping the step of tagging, yet being able to find a particular bookmark when I need it. Now LookLater might be the answer to this. First I heard of it from the post Startup blog, day 1 on The Business of Software. The idea was to have the first beta release out in 12 days! If you scroll down the original post, you’ll find out that Doug Martin, the author of the idea, is someone who really has the vision and experience to make it happen. He set up the development blog so that others could watch his progress in reaching the goal.

The first beta release did not happen yet, but it is about to happen anytime now. In the meanwhile, Doug released a couple of pre-beta demos, and they were quite impressive. It had that rare quality of being pleasant to use when I tried. I called those little bookmark pieces that were created on my clicks the looklets. Yet a very important thing to me was that Doug really listened to the users, and came up with things than can make me switch to LookLater indeed!

Anyway, don’t just read about it. Get out, read the development blog, try the demos, touch it, and feel what it’s like. You might like it as much as I did.

As a puzzle collector, I am an active user of eBay. eBay is invaluable source of rare and difficult to find things, including puzzles. I am also a user of sniping tools as they, on one hand, allow me to place my bids while I am away from the computer, and on the other hand, help me to place the bids at the very last moment, thus leaving little chance for someone else to outbid me. One tool that I used before was JBidWatcher, but then I switched to Biet-O-Matic, for it’s a more lightweight, yet capable enough tool.

Until now, due to the eBay’s pricing scheme for the use of their API calls, the sniping tools I’ve been using employed the strategy of scraping the content of the site. Not only did not that conform to the eBay’s User Agreement, it also had the tendency to break once in a while due to changes in the pages layout that eBay made routinely. Starting today, eBay dropped all fees it charged for the use of the API (when you use their new unified scheme), as well as the fees for the membership in the Developers Program. The programs and tools developed by people still require certification, but it’s free now as well, see Member Benefits and Fees.

Anyone who has been using sniping tools knows the feeling when a bid did not go through due to the tool being broken because eBay changed the page layout. Hopefully with the use of the eBay API these tools can reach a higher level of realibility that I’ve been looking for. I also had an idea for an interesting tool that I called “Concise eBay” about a year ago. After careful calculation, and reading the eBay forums, I decided against it. The idea still stands, and I might even get back to it sometime now, who knows!

There is a lot of these gatherings happening here and there now. They are short (one-two days) events where attendees meet to share ideas, learn from others, and just hang out. They are short open-space informal conferences. There are certains community rules to them. If you are not from the local area, you’re often invited to stay overnight right there where the event takes place - just bring your sleeping bag. FooCamp, BarCamp, TagCamp, recent MindCamp, as well as BrainJam, TechCrunch BBQ, and now HyperCamp - these events are organized more and more in different places in the States and other countries, such as France (Paris), Holland (Amsterdam), and our neighbor Canada (Toronto). More camps appear now, that are not necessarily about technology: look at LongTailCamp. If you’re organizing one, look for tips in FooCamp Wiki.

The materials from the camps are often published on the web in form of papers, podcasts, or video.

There is also an event being organized in Washington DC area: BarCamp DC. The date is not set yet, however, and it’s been so for a long time now. I’d like to see it happen, and I hope I will not be away when the event takes place.

It’s a rephrase of the motto found on IT Conversations, a web service that offers lots of audio recordings with talks from various tech conferences, and interviews with people leading the industry. Generally, I am not a listener, I am a reader. That’s mostly due to my being hard of hearing and being unable to effectively use all those nice gadgets that deliver sound to your ears, as they are hardly compatible with the hearing aids I have to wear. Yet I found myself hooked to these recordings. The conversations are very, very interesting, and the emotional context gives the words a whole new angle you don’t have in a transcript. Take a look around, find the area that interests you, and give it a try.

Another thing that I think should be mentioned in this context is NerdTV, a weekly one-hour online show that offers interviews with famous people from the world of technology. It’s video, not just the audio, so you have a chance to see all these people. I watch it since the first show was released, and I am not going to stop. Each show has a version with subtitles, but they’re permanent (and ugly), not your usual on-demand subtitles that come with DivX movies and can be turned on or off. There is a transcript for each show, it’s helpful for those who are not fluent in english.

Most of these conversations don’t make it to the printed media, so I can’t read them anywhere. They are lost unless they’re listened to. Listening to them can give you a new view to whatever you’re thinking of, and give you new ideas that you don’t find anywhere else.