News: Google is the real winner in its own contest
Just weeks after inviting the public into its labs to try out experimental technologies, Google on Friday announced the winner of a $10,000 contest that brought in a small fortune in programming contributions.

The winner of Google's first programming contest is Daniel Egnor, a New York programmer whose entry is designed to let searchers find Web pages within a designated geographical area.

While Egnor, an employee of a New York investment bank he would not name, walks away from the contest with $10,000, Google may be the real winner, reserving for itself a "worldwide, perpetual, fully paid-up, nonexclusive license to make, sell or use the technology related thereto, including but not limited to the software, algorithms, techniques, concepts, etc., associated with the entry."

Those broad rights apply not only to Egnor's winning entry, but to all the losing ones as well.

Honorable mentions include a variety of search technologies having to do with grouping semantic concepts, reducing Google's bias against newly authored pages, helping hyperlinks stay connected when their target moves, giving preference to pages containing every query term entered, and compressing index files.

In April, Google released its application programming interfaces, letting developers tap into Google's 2 billion-document repository.

This month the search site opened its research and development labs, inviting commentary from the public.
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-929902.html