Google's on the Patent Offensive

Forever the word magnet, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) is hoping to piggyback off creative minds with its latest offering, Google Patent Search. Users of the free service can sift through more than 7 million registered patents.

One can kill some serious time at www.Google.com/patents. Entering "The Motley Fool" spits back 19 entries. Disney (NYSE: DIS) shows up in more than 600 patents, but they aren't all necessarily Disney patents. For instance, if you roll with "Google," you are also treated to hundreds of results, leading off with a 1927 patent filing that was granted a year later ... for a mosquito repellent. The inventor just happened to be named Charles Google.

Standing on the shoulders of giants isn't necessarily a new endeavor for the paid-search leader. Because it relies on the volume of pages on which it can serve up relevant ads, Google has had no problem rolling out everything from book-text searches to its consumer-driven Google Base listing service. They all serve the same end, in that Google has a growing fleet of advertisers looking to cash in on the perfect simplicity of contextual marketing.

For now, Google's patent area is in beta, and it is not serving ads. I tried my best to get ads to pop out at me by searching for high-demand keywords such as "mortgage" and "credit cards," but it all stayed pure in its brain-food splendor. However, the listings are set off far to the left, like Google's regular search results, so it's really just a matter of time before columns of ads begin scrolling down the right column, just as viewers find in Google's other offerings, including Gmail and Book Search.

The patent offerings may not have the same kind of mainstream appeal as Google's more conventional services, but it means that there are incremental pages to serve -- and that should translate into incremental revenue.

If anything, this is a case of Google claiming more virtual real estate for itself. You don't want pesky rivals such as Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) bugging you by being able to say they got there first. So, in that sense, Google and Charles Google have that much in common -- they both set out to repel bugs.

Do insert your own Microsoft joke of choice at this point. (Just kidding, Ballmer, baby.)

Microsoft is an Inside Value recommendation, and Yahoo! and Disney are active Motley Fool Stock Advisor picks.

Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz is a huge fan of Google, and it would be his homepage if it weren't for Fool.com taking up that piece of real estate. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story, except for Disney. Rick is also part of the Rule Breakersnewsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early. The Fool has adisclosure policy.