While the search engine wars between Google, Yahoo, Amazon’s new A9.com, Ask Jeeves, MSN, IceRocket, and others march on, PatentCafe’s ICO Global Patent Search stands quietly in the background as the search engine used to search search engine technology.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! and Google struck an agreement reportedly worth about $280 million to Yahoo! as satisfaction for Google’s alleged infringement of Overture’s US Patent number 6,269,361. Yahoo acquired Overture, along with its ‘361 patent, in July 2003 for $1.6 billion.

Was Google’s treading on Overture’s ‘316 patent a costly mistake, an oversight, or a calculated business risk? Leading up to its IPO, Google said “With respect to any intellectual property rights claim, we may have to pay damages or stop using technology found to be in violation of a third party’s rights.”

It doesn’t require a legal beagle or technical guru to assess whether a company is embarking in a technology space where patent infringement risks are high. PatentCafe’s ICO global patent search allows any non-patent professionals such as venture capitalists, CEOs or marketing managers to enter a huge search query, even 1,000 words in natural language, into its advanced Latent Semantic Analysis search engine – the technology BusinessWeek called “beyond Google”.

The world’s largest patent filers, law firms and venture capitalists are increasingly relying on PatentCafe’s ICO patent search engine to assess industry R&D activity, monitor competitors, or find potential patent infringers.

On PatentCafe’s ICO patent search engine, the CONCEPT of an invention, not the literal words, is searched against 22 million patents in its database (250 million pages, or about 3 terabytes of US and international patents). The searcher instantly receives an organized list of the most important patents – all relevancy ranked.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, and even the US Patent and Trademark Office’s search queries are limited to only a few words – and none of these web search engines access global patent databases.

In his book “Essentials of Patents” (John Wiley & Sons, 2002) PatentCafe CEO Andy Gibbs explains how CEOs from the leading technology companies are taking a serious approach to Patent Quality Management (PQM) as a core business focus, and how CEOs lagging behind the patent management curve can implement sensible patent management metrics throughout the organization.

The search engine wars are far from over. Using PatentCafe’s patent search engine to search search engine technology, web search engine companies and their attorneys are just beginning to lay the groundwork for legal battles that will continue changing the search engine landscape over the next few years.

Want to know which companies are most active in developing “next generation” technologies? Learn what Google never taught you – search patents.