Google has had its similarity engine patent approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

This releases Google to further research and manage duplicate content on the web.

This is a high impact sign of the times for the SEM industry and the likes.

Plagiarism has always been a problem for Internet Marketing specialists as the search engines do not like duplicate content. Unique content can be time consuming to produce and to avoid similar content is just as difficult. All content copywriters want their work to be recognised and unique content is half way to winning the content wars.

Google were awarded this patent (patent number 7,158,961) after more then five years in the application process. Other large organisations have filed similar patents, but Google have, yet again, come out with the application grant.

Another take is that Google’s similarity engine will hopefully assist Google in providing an even better set of results to the search audience. By stripping out similar/duplicate content and only displaying unique/quality results, Google will be streets ahead of the SE competition in the similarity stakes.

This will provide the Search audience with a much more varied array of search results and will force the marketers to produce higher quality work to be recognised, thus improving the web in-whole.

If Google continue to register more patents like the similarity engine, then it is unlikely Google will be under any competitive threat for some time.

Google has commonly been reported as the daddy of all search engines and this train of thought for the industry giant is just proof that they have the brains on board to tackle the industry and come out on top.