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Google Receives Patent for Home Page Design

by Caleb Johnson on September 3, 2009 at 02:24 PM


Further increasing its dominance over everything Web-related, Google received a patent Tuesday for the design of its home page, according to Gawker. One might ask, "What is there to patent?" After all, the design is minimalist at best and plain at worst. Well, it means that Google owns the idea of having a home page with a search box placed in the middle (where else?), two buttons underneath that box (seems logical enough), and numerous links surrounding the aforementioned items (not unreasonable).

So, if you're an enterprising individual that's thinking about creating your own Internet search engine, design just became a lot more difficult. You'll be forced to come up with some complicated and busy interface. That's because, if this patent is enforced, Google pretty much owns the idea of a clean, simple home page whose design makes sense. And that's not to mention the potential implications for sites like Yahoo!, which has a search page fairly similar to Google's.

Nonetheless, it's been a long road for Google, which first applied for the patent in 2004. We'd think it's a safe bet to say that, at Google HQ, the champagne flowed -- like the tears of everyone else on the Web. [From: Gawker]

Tags: homepage, patent, search, search engines, SearchEngines, top, web

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