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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

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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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