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To me, that one seems to actually be a non-obvious, patentable idea. It made the world a better place. This isn't 1-click checkout or clickable phone numbers on a smart phone...

But I don't think Google actually sued anyone when most other search engines started using that method. Correct me if I'm wrong.

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evaluating/rating articles on the base of references and citations of them in other articles has been a useful and known practice in academia. Applying it to web pages was innovative (compare with original _invention_ of such algorithm for the scientific articles), yet doesn't seems to be something that warrants involvement of government force to keep others from applying the same academia article evaluation principles to web pages.

It is exactly the kind of innovative solution that multiple developers would discover independently. It is exactly the kind of idea that does not need a 17 year monopoly to incentivize investors to provide cash for its development.

In fact multiple people did discover similar strategies at the same point in time such as: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/auth.pdf

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