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UNITED DEVICES GRANTED INTERNET GRID SEARCH PATENT

United Devices Inc announced the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) awarded the company a patent covering core Internet search technology. Filed in 2000, patent #6,654,783 covers the use of Grids in the performance of network site content indexing. United Devices currently operates one of the world's largest public Grids at www.grid.org and has always believed that using this technology to perform content indexing is the future of all search portals.

The genesis of this intellectual property was the realization that the Internet's page growth rate, page change rate and proliferating rich media types could not be reliably indexed in a timely manner with conventional computing infrastructures. Even the best commercial search sites like Google and Yahoo! can't produce an index without a time lag between the content being published and it showing up in search results. Using Grid computing techniques and leading search algorithms together could produce the most up to date indexes while allowing all media types to be included in search results.

"Consider being able to perform a search that never returns a dead link. Or performing a search on breaking news that actually returns relevant and up to date information," said Ed Hubbard, United Devices president and founder. "This technology will even make it possible to search video data types for specific mentions of a company or product name and find the relevant clips because there will be enough computational power to perform speech-to-text extraction of the video's audio stream. When Grids are coupled with cutting edge search all of this is achievable."

"Today, everyone realizes the value of search. United Devices vision of Grid and search together illustrates that we are still very early in the development of the ultimate search engine," said Virginia M. Turezyn, a managing director of Constellation Ventures, a media, communications and software venture capital fund managed by Bear Stearns Asset Management. She adds, "This patent proves there is a tremendous amount of innovation still to come from combining Grid computing techniques with other mainstream technologies."