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 I was an undergraduate English major and one of the professors I really appreciated the advice of used to teach us, taught me a class in deconstruction of literature. And so, it was the idea of reading something, looking at all the parts, everything that made it what it was and combine that with the homework we used to do in law school which is taking judicial opinions, breaking them down into 9 different parts or types of things. It's a habit I developed from years of school. To read something, break it down in parts. Patents are really easy. They identify a problem, they tell you about the prior art involved that is used to solve it. And why that's sometimes insufficient, then they tell you *We have a solution, and here's what it is, here's where we're going.* And that's what a patent does. Jason Barnard Brilliant, it does seem very simple. I mean, I look at them and I just go *I can't think through all this stuff.* But, if you think of all the structure of it, it becomes much easier. And your combination of English and law is absolutely perfect. Bill Slawski Right. Jason Barnard And you're looking at specific papers by specific people because you recognize their style? Bill Slawski Some of them write differently than others. Some of them are very predictable. They, you know, understand the difference between an F. Scott Fitzgerald and a Ernest Hemingway. They write in very different styles. Ernest Hemingway writes in a, what you would call, an iceberg style, where you just see the very top of what he's writing. Most of it's under the water. It's sort of assumed. He expects you to know things. Jason Barnard Yeah. Bill Slawski William Faulkner is a stream of consciousness writer and just spouts out lots, and lots, and lots of thoughts, endless streams of words that paint pictures of things. So he's not hiding everything under the water like Hemingway does. Same thing with writers of patents. Some of them will very straight forward tell you, these are the advantages of following the process in this patent. The next big list of ten, twelve, fifteen things. This is why you should do it. Not all of them do that. Jason Barnard Okay. Brilliant stuff, I'm learning all about patents. Somebody out there who writes patents in an Ernest Hemingway kind of a way. Oh, that's brilliant. I love that. So, I mean, I've been reading your articles for a while. And, you get to talk yesterday's SEO camp. It was actually brilliant, I mean, the whole SEO camp, in fact, was brilliant, yeah? Bill Slawski It was fun, yeah. Jason Barnard Yeah, you enjoyed it. That was a bit of a leading question 'cause you wouldn't really say no, could you? You listed seventeen patents in the beginning, but you actually talked about five or six. Bill Slawski I think there's ways of providing evidence, or proof, or provenance of something being more likely true than not. One of them is when a patent is released and there are lots of related patents. On the same topic, the same subject, not exactly the same thing, but they work well together. And it's as if somebody had a lot of thoughts that were combined together towards some idea. So, the first one of those that I listed of the seventeen was one that's sort of the root of local search in Google. The fact that they gain information about local entities and that's not how most people talk about local search. The local entities from sources like local directories or data aggregators or enterprise websites. And, if the facts about those local entities is consistent from one source to another to another, it's more likely than not that that information is correct. It's true. Jason Barnard Yeah. Bill Slawski There's sort of, like, corroborating evidence based upon consistency across the web. Jason Barnard Yeah, I love the word consistency. Bill Slawski Which is something they're doing with entities with attributes, with bad properties of those entities. If they can be consistent across the web, they're more likely to use that information in answers in search results. Jason Barnard Yeah, the name of the guy escapes me. Now at Amazon bought a machine learning company, and he was saying that Google Maps is a great example of a functioning knowledge graph. Bill Slawski It is. Jason Barnard And yeah, the idea that with all the data that they're getting in and the people fact checking, they can actually answer queries that have never been asked before, in terms of directing people to somewhere. Is that fair? Bill Slawski Google acquired a company called Zip Dash. And Zip Dash developed the idea of using GPS data from different devices to track traffic. Jason Barnard Okay. When did they acquire them? Bill Slawski It was in the mid 2000's. Jason Barnard Okay right. So they had time to get it right. Bill Slawski So I think to a degree, Apple is doing that too. So you're driving along, some place you've been to before. You turn on your navigation and Google Maps navigator will tell you that there's a traffic delay. To give you a chance to turn off the road and take an alternate route. Which is really convenient. I use Google Maps navigation for places I've gone to before. I know how to get to, just because of that feature. Jason Barnard Yeah, no, I understand, I mean, I do too and I've got so used to it that when it gets it wrong I get really annoyed with it. I was with Hugo, the colleague I was playing music with, who you met. And we were in Lyon, they said don't leave now 'cause it will take at least two hours. But we said *Ah, we'll leave anyways.* We just wanted to get going, and we used Google Maps. We went through this incredibly torturous little route. We could see the traffic jams on the flyovers all around. The same car was behind us the whole way. And I kind of figured he must be looking at Google Maps and Google has pushed us through this route that presumably couldn't get blocked up, and then it pushes other people to another one. Bill Slawski