[_0w8t]

When runnaroo.com was shut down I was surprised that it was done by single person who managed for some searches to return better results than Google.

Which among other things shows that patents are bad for innovation in new and quickly changing industry. Google came up with their algorithm and heavily patterned it. As an invention it was not ground-breaking, but it matched very well how web worked. This gave them essentially monopoly in search from which they massively profited. At least now those patents expire.

[sidibe]

I've never heard of anyone saying patents have much to do with Googles success, can you point me to something about that? To me their infrastructure and scale was the big edge they've had over everyone