Bill Slawski with Jason Barnard at SEOcamp Paris 2019 Bill Slawski talks with Jason Barnard about patents and entities in search since 1999. Patents are really easy (or so says Bill Slawski): they identify a problem, they tell you about the prior art used to solve the problem, tell you why that’s insufficient, then they provide a solution. We also talk about patent writing styles and the Ernest Hemingway of patents. We look at Google Maps as a knowledge graph and traffic cop. Onto why many of the best employees moved from Microsoft and Yahoo to Google (the reason is not what I thought). Remembering dates, names and patents is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Along the way, we work back through the history of entities in search, starting 2019 and right back as far as 1998 (Sergueï Brin). This interview / conversation was recorded at 7 am in a bakers shop in Saint Denis near Paris and has an amazing backing track of coffee, bread and the locals chatting in Arabic and watching TV (don’t worry, it doesn’t ruin the listening experience, it a truly makes it better :) Jason Barnard SEO is AEO! Welcome to the show, Bill Slawski. Bill Slawski Thank you Jason. Jason Barnard Right. Lovely to meet you. For the listeners, please excuse us, there's quite a lot of noise behind, some people talking Arabic. We're at a boulangerie, a bakery in the middle of Saint Denis in France. It's seven o'clock in the morning after SEO camp. This is absolutely brilliant because the coffee machine keeps going off. People keep coming in to chat to the guy. That's just setting the scene cause we're having a good laugh here. Yeah, Bill? Bill Slawski It's a good atmosphere. I love going to breakfast in the morning at bakeries. Jason Barnard And this is a bit of a different bakery than you get in San Diego, yeah? Bill Slawski It's not too much different. Jason Barnard Oh! Right, okay. Bill Slawski There were a few like this, yeah. Jason Barnard Brilliant stuff! So you don't feel too, kind of, away from home, you're feeling very much at home. Bill Slawski And this reminds me more of what I used to go to when I lived in Virginia. Jason Barnard Okay. Bill Slawski It is the Red Truck Bakery. The owner, the baker owned a red truck and used to cater events. He'd drive up in a red truck and hand out bread and pastries. Jason Barnard Yeah, so that Red Truck Bakery, he thought long and hard about the name of his bakery. Bill Slawski Yeah, he had a red truck and parked down from events Jason Barnard I was stuck in Lawrence yesterday and he was looking for examples for something and there was a lemon tree right next to him. So, all the examples were lemons. It was brilliant, but we all have tendencies to do that. We look around, and my idea is the name of the street or swimming pool. Bill Slawski When I started my website, SEO by the Sea, I was standing in the second floor window in an office in Havre de Grace, Maryland watching sails bouncing up and down on the Chesapeake Bay. Jason Barnard Brilliant. Jason Barnard Okay, and so SEO by the Sea is your blog. And your company is Go Fish Digital, so that's all terribly sea oriented. Bill Slawski It's not my company, it's a company with a couple friends who I met at a meet up ten years ago or so. I was speaking on named entities in 2007. Jason Barnard That sounds terribly probable, yeah. Bill Slawski Yeah. Jason Barnard And when, sorry? Bill Slawski 2007. Jason Barnard Okay, so ten years before I even knew what they were. Brilliant stuff. Let's get on to something a bit more professional. Bill Slawski Okay. Jason Barnard You look at the patents, we all know that, Bill Slawski, the patents guy. I'm very thankful to you as I said earlier on, that you read them so that I don't have to. I assumed it was just because you're a lawyer and that's kind of the connection, but in fact it's not, is it? Can you tell me? Bill Slawski