Google Gets Patent for World's Simplest Homepage

After a five-and-a-half-year fight, Google and its attorneys have managed to convince federal bureaucrats to bestow a patent on the company's iconic home page. We always thought the page was brain-dead simple, but apparently it's an innovative "graphical user interface."

The CLAIM was made as Graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal.


At first, Google's homepage was simple because its founders wanted a basic front-end to test their technology. Marissa Mayer, who is in charge of Google's homepage, mentioned some interesting tidbits:

The document is as minimalist as the interface, containing a single illustration of Google.com, with the company logo depicted in dotted lines to indicate it is not an integral part of the patent.

In other words, subject to how the patent is enforced, Google owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. Since the time of the patent application in 2004, the company has moved some links, for searching News and Groups and other alternate databases, from directly above the search box to the top of the home page. But Google presumably believes its patent is broad enough to cover the variation.