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Search engine veteran poo-poos AltaVista patent claims

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/16484.html

By: Kieren McCarthy

Posted: 30/01/2001 at 18:01 GMT

AltaVista's claim that it owns patents to virtually all search engine technology has been mocked by a search engine veteran, Alan Emtage.

The CEO of AltaVista's parent company CMGI, David Wetherall, said in an Internet World interview earlier this month that not only did AltaVista have a large number of patents on search engines but that the company would start to pursue people that infringed them (i.e. everyone).

This was too much for Alan Emtage, who created one of the earliest search engines, Archie. In a Business Wire press release, Alan explained that his engine - released first in 1989 - used FTP to crawl public sites and index them for Internet users. At its peak, there were apparently over 30 Archie indexers, searching millions of files.

Emtage said: "Though I'm not a lawyer, the patents being 'defended' by CMGI/AltaVista include basic concepts that were incorporated into the Archie system years before the World Wide Web even existed. Archie was crawling and indexed FTP sites with fairly sophisticated algorithms even as I was sitting at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings with Tim Berners-Lee while he created the World Wide Web."

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