Posts Tagged: "Bing"

Visual Search Engines: A New Side Door for Competitors or a Better Infringement Detection Tool?

Text-based search engines, such as Google and Yahoo (remember Ask Jeeves?), were arguably the most important development leading to our now everyday reliance on the Internet. The concept is simple: type a word or string of words into that inviting text box and instruct your favorite search engine to scour the Internet. The search engine does its magic and quickly displays a list of results, typically hyperlinks to webpages containing information the search engine decided was most relevant to your search. As web technology has progressed, search engines have become smarter and more robust. All major search engines can now, in response to text input, spit out a combination of web pages, images, videos, new articles, and other types of files.Of course, IP owners and those interested in capitalizing on the IP rights of others have found many creative ways to leverage search engine technology to get their goods and services to the top of search engine result pages. These techniques have sparked an entire industry—search engine optimization—which has long been the subject of copyright and trademark litigation. Given that nearly all consumers now have camera-enabled mobile devices, search engine providers have invested heavily in “visual” search engine technology. Visual search engines run search queries on photograph or image input, instead of text input. For example, a tourist visiting the Washington Monument can snap a quick photo of the famous obelisk and upload it into the visual search engine. The visual search engine will then analyze (using, for example, AI or other complicated algorithms) various data points within the photograph to identify the target and then spit out relevant information such as the location, operating hours, history, nearby places of interest, and the like. Google (Google Lens), Microsoft (Bing Visual Search), and Pinterest are all leveraging this technology.Critically important for IP owners, visual search engines can be used by consumers to identify products and quickly comparison shop or identify related products. A golfer could snap a photograph of a golf shirt and ask the visual search engine to return results to find a better price on that shirt or to identify a matching hat or pair of pants. Similarly, a music listener could snap a photograph of an album cover and ask the visual search engine to return results for other music in the same genre that might be interesting to the listener. These are only a few examples of the powerful capabilities of visual search engine technology.

Trademark hijackers are hurting online advertisers; here’s how to stop them

Avery Labels worked hard to establish its brand among consumers as the premier retailer of label products, as well as providing software solutions through their design-and-print-online tool and one-stop premium printing service, “WePrint.” As a result, when consumers search online for label products, Avery is typically the top-of-mind brand, making Avery the envy of its competitors. A few of those competitors recently attempted to benefit from Avery’s category-leading position by using the Avery trademark on their digital marketing ads without Avery’s permission, which not only drove up Avery’s ad costs and cut into its results, but was a clear case of trademark infringement.

The Third Wave: Why Big Data is the Future of Legal Tech

As anyone who’s worked at a law firm can attest, lawyers at a firm use each others’ experience to inform their strategy in a given case. Firm-wide emails asking if anyone has appeared in front of a particular judge or tribunal are routine and allow lawyers to benefit from the insights their colleagues provide. Big data analytics allow lawyers to gather this same information, but on a much larger scale. For instance, analytics platforms allow attorneys to view their judge’s complete history, including every decision issued and every case cited, to identify the legal precedent the judge finds most persuasive.

American consumers increasingly happy with social media but not search engines

The big winner among social media e-businesses in the 2015 consumer index is Pinterest, the personal web cataloguing service headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Its consumer satisfaction index score rose by about 3 percent since last year to a score of 78, tied for the best 2015 index score of any e-business. Most people think of Pinterest as a fun website for getting party ideas or tips on how to style a home, but there have been some interesting aspects of Pinterest’s business developing. Recently, the Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) announced that Pinterest, which manages about 1.3 billion pins related to money management, is driving about 30 percent of the company’s social media traffic. A police department in Dover, DE, recently became one of a small but growing contingent of departments who have launched Pinterest accounts to advertise a public lost & found service. Pinterest users who have ever found themselves frustrated at an inability to purchase imaginative items they find on the site may be happy to note that the site is rolling out buyable pins.