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Comment by pwf | Hacker News Reader

I tried searching around to see if Instagram had any patents that were discussed on the web after their sale. I could find absolutely nothing useful. The search algorithm decided that news about Facebook's acquisition and their AOL patents was so 'hot' that it would show me only day old links.

It's a useful feature at first glance, but more and more often I find myself wishing that Google would just work like I expect it to (like it used to).

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The alternative answer is that Instagram has no patents, and nobody is talking about it, so there's no search results to return for that.

And as far as I can tell, Instagram didn't have any patents. A quick Google Patent Search doesn't turn anything up with their name in it either [1].

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=instagram&tbm=pts

One UI thing we've struggled with is how to tell the user that we don't think there are any good results for the query. It's a very difficult thing to evaluate effectively, because most of our notions of a good search result page (obviously) involve there being results on it. But it seems intuitively that there's a big value to quickly and reliably concluding "nope nothing" and moving on.

It's a problem exacerbated by the increasing size of our index. It's hard to quickly tell whether you've reached the noise floor of the internet yet.

That's the conclusion I came to, but it wasn't very definitive. At the very least I expected to come across links to people talking about their lack of patents. Maybe I should have searched for 'instagram no patents'.

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