25 search-engine and IR patents by Andrei Broder, the cross-vendor inventor who shaped near-duplicate detection at DEC/AltaVista, co-invented the foundational CAPTCHA at Compaq, built the AltaVista web-page ranking system, authored web-page-decay signal at IBM, and shaped ad-matching/SERP-features/CAPTCHA-evolution infrastructure at Yahoo. Lead inventor on the foundational MinHash/shingling patent (US 6,349,296), the fingerprint-collision-probability technique (US 5,974,481), the document-resemblance shingling patent (US 6,230,155), and the foundational CAPTCHA patent (US 6,195,698). Spans 1999 to 2024.
About the Andrei Broder, Cross-Vendor Search Patents track
25 search-engine and IR patents by Andrei Broder, the cross-vendor inventor who shaped near-duplicate detection at DEC/AltaVista, co-invented the foundational CAPTCHA at Compaq, built the AltaVista web-page ranking system, authored web-page-decay signal at IBM, and shaped ad-matching/SERP-features/CAPTCHA-evolution infrastructure at Yahoo. Lead inventor on the foundational MinHash/shingling patent (US 6,349,296), the fingerprint-collision-probability technique (US 5,974,481), the document-resemblance shingling patent (US 6,230,155), and the foundational CAPTCHA patent (US 6,195,698). Spans 1999 to 2024.
Foundational IR Infrastructure
- Method for Estimating the Probability of Collisions of Fingerprints (US 5,974,481 · October 26, 1999)
- Method for Clustering Closely Resembling Data Objects (MinHash / Shingling) (US 6,349,296 · February 19, 2002)
- Method and Apparatus for Ranking Web Page Search Results (US 6,560,600 · May 6, 2003)
- Method for Clustering Closely Resembling Data Objects (DEC-era) (US 6,119,124 · September 12, 2000)
- Method for Determining the Resemblance of Documents (US 6,230,155 · May 8, 2001)
- Compression Protocol with Multiple Preset Dictionaries (US 5,953,503 · September 14, 1999)
- Method and Apparatus for Ranking Web Page Search Results (Overture 2005) (US 6,871,202 · March 22, 2005)
- Method for Ranking Web Page Search Results (Overture 2008) (US 7,398,461 · July 8, 2008)
- UIMA / Unstructured Information Management with Multi-Tokenization Views (US 7,139,752 · November 21, 2006)
- Method for Identifying Related Pages in a Hyperlinked Database (Yahoo) (US 7,630,973 · December 8, 2009)
Web Page Decay & Freshness
- Methods and Apparatus for Assessing Web Page Decay (US App 2008/0097978 · April 24, 2008)
- Methods and Apparatus for Assessing Web Page Decay (sibling app) (US App 2008/0097977 · April 24, 2008)
Search Advertising & SERP Features
- Ad Matching by Augmenting a Search Query with Knowledge Obtained Through Search (US App 2009/0254512 · October 8, 2009)
- Context Transfer in Search Advertising (US 8,886,636 · November 11, 2014)
- System and Method for Providing Contextual Actions on a Search Results Page (US 9,015,140 · April 21, 2015)
- Method and System for Quantifying User Interactions with Web Advertisements (US 8,812,362 · August 19, 2014)
- Method and System for Using Email Receipts for Targeted Advertising (US App 2012/0047014 · February 23, 2012)
- Presentation of Content Based on Utility (US App 2012/0084155 · April 5, 2012)
Security & Social Surfaces
- Method for Selectively Restricting Access to Computer Systems (Foundational CAPTCHA) (US 6,195,698 · February 27, 2001)
- Multi-Step CAPTCHA with Serial Time-Consuming Decryption of Puzzles (US 8,522,327 · August 27, 2013)
- Generating Hard Instances of CAPTCHAs (US App 2010/0077209 · March 25, 2010)
- CAPTCHA Image Generation (US App 2010/0077210 · March 25, 2010)
- Classification and Storage of Events in a Network (US 8,666,819 · March 4, 2014)
- System and Method for a Cloud-Based Electronic Communication Vault (US 8,788,819 · July 22, 2014)
- System and Method for Social Filtering of Comments (US 12,039,493 · July 16, 2024)
Why this inventor matters
Each inventor track inside the Nizam SEO War Room patents archive isolates one engineer's research arc — typically a decade or more of continuations, divisionals, and follow-up patents on a coherent research thread. Reading by inventor (rather than by topic) recovers the narrative: how the original disclosure evolved, what the continuations added, which claims got carved out into divisional applications, and how the thread eventually intersected with other research lines at Google or Microsoft. This is how working SEOs build durable intuition about search-engine internals — not by memorizing claim language, but by following the research bibliography that shipped the algorithms we now optimize against.
How to read this track
Start with the earliest filing — it sets the foundational disclosure. Continuations refine the claims; divisional applications split out separable inventions; the follow-up patents tend to introduce performance optimizations, edge-case handling, or downstream integration with other systems. Each patent on this site is annotated with the ranking surface it touches — query understanding, document retrieval, ranking, behavioral signals, knowledge graph, or AI search — so the practitioner can map the research back to the algorithm output observed on live SERPs.