Looking through my Google Reader I spot interesting news about Google from Mashable. Looks like Google has patented its home page design where (quote) “the patent application contains a single illustration of the familiar Google.com user interface”. Google has been trying to patent the home interface as well as the google restuls interface since 2004 but just yesterday the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) approved it. Gawker presents the actual documents of the patented illustration and reffers to the Google home page as the “world’s simplest homepage”. Is this really happening?

Was this really necessary?

Well, I can start by saying I’ve seen Google based torrent sites like Tooorgle.com. Now, Tooorgle has changed their design and the interesting part is that the site didn’t allow any search engine to index any other files on the site except of its homepage and a few pages like contact or terms of use pages. But a few months ago it looked just like Google, basically a clone, same Google-like logo colours and same 2 buttons in the same position as the current Google home page.

Now, Google solves this kind of present and future issues with the yesterday’s patent approval of its homepage. In other words, Google by patenting its homepage wanted to get more trustworthy to its users, since they own the majority of the Internet searches in the world, ONLY GOOGLE SHOULD BE AND ACT LIKE THAT.

On the other hand, it is the world’s simplest home page but let’s not get that absurd. If it’s anyone who should patent a couple of HTML inputs (except the logo) maybe it should be W3C. I mean, they’re the ones responsable for HTML since the 3.2 version in January 1997 (“HTML 3.2 was published as a W3C Recommendation. It was the first version developed and standardized exclusively by the W3C” – says Wikipedia.)

This might be a start for a monopol on the world’s simplest things too. Practically the guys from Google want to take credit for the code and looks that my 8 year old sister can write, draw and publish in 2 minutes online. She might get sued for that. Nice.

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