Google Patents Browser Highlight All Button

An anonymous reader writes "Google has picked up another patent on a technology that you might think basic to the web: the highlight all button for searches in browsers. The patent will backdate to 1999 and presents an interesting problem for such software as the Firefox browser and FeedDemon RSS reader. And, in an interesting twist, Microsoft uses a similar mechanism in Windows Explorer. But Microsoft itself said that browser technology can't be separated from the operating system. Does that mean the company owes a royalty to Google for all those copies of Windows?"

Re:What a Mess....

[gstoddart]

That'd be the "Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art" standard for obviousness. Of course, that standard is applied to a POSITA at the time of invention (i.e. 1999) rather than a POSITA today.

So, in 1995 I had a shell script which ran grep recursively over a file structure and listed the matching files and highlighted the term.

I'm pretty sure you don't need to look very far for other things that could "search and highlight" a term across multiple documents.

Am I missing something?

Re:Does that mean the company owes a royalty to Go

[Garridan]

No, it means y'all need to read the fucking patent. It doesn't patent anything going on in the browser. It patents the feature in Google search where it alters the document to highlight certain words, and then pass that modified document back to the client.

Re:In particular,

[Meshach]

it is high-lighting all terms in all documents received from an internet search. How is that the same as a "highlight all button?" Whatever the case, highlighted searches have existed for a while, so why should this be patentable just because they batch the highlighting to all search results in a "network search"?

What this patent actually is for (from my reading) is a system that highlights the search terms in every page that a user loads. So if I am on the NYT and I do a page search (ctrl-f) for "Julian Assange" it will highlight all the occurrences. The patent is for the notion that when I transfer to the Washington Post all the instances of "Julian Assange" will be highlighted in the new page.

Still pretty weak but not the head slapping obvious it initially looks like.

Re:Microsoft

[Ark42]

Windows 98 (but not 95 or 95 OSR2) has this feature in the system Help (winhelp.exe). I have every old version of Windows in VMware, in their default install state with auto-revert.
Just load a fresh Win98 install, press F1, and go to the Search tab. Whatever you search for is highlighted in blue in the help topic that appears on the right side.
The Options button at the top can disable this if you select "Highlighting Off" and you can turn it back on by selecting "Highlighting On"
winhelp.exe is dated May 11, 1998. Must be prior art.