Thomas Claburn of InformationWeek wrote yesterday, September 19, 2007:

Google (GOOG) isn't merely targeting the mobile phone market with its rumored gPhone. It may be going after video games, TV, and mobile e-commerce too.

Such deftly hedged speculation comes from Evaluserve, a global consulting and research firm, based on what it believes to be concealed competitive intelligence about Google's patent portfolio, never mind that other Google watchers have sizing up Google based on non-obvious patents for years now.

In a new report obtained by InformationWeek, the firm claims that most of Google's patent portfolio may be missed by simply searching the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office's (USPTO) online database.

Seeking Web 2.0-related patents published during the period January 2001 to May 2007, Evaluserve says that it scoured the Delphion patent database for patents and patent applications filed at the USPTO, the European Patent Office (EPO), the Japanese Patent Office (JPO), and the World-wide Intellectual Property Office (WIPO).

Unsurprisingly, it found that Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo were the most active filers. Yet Google's patents turned out to be less evident through a USPTO search than the patents of its competitors.

"The search strategy given above concludes that only 13% of Google's total filings are at the USPTO, whereas 78% of its filings are PCT [Patent Cooperation Treaty] applications," the Evaluserve report says. "This result seems to stand out since more than 50% of the filings of Microsoft (MSFT), IBM (IBM) and Yahoo (YHOO) are also at the USPTO. However, a closer examination reveals that around 84% of the U.S. patent applications filed by Google in the Web 2.0 space did not have Google's name printed on the published patent application, since this information was not provided to the USPTO at the time of filing."