Do you trust Google? (Humor, but an idea worth consideration)

Imagine you have an excellent business idea, something as revolutionary as Newton's law of gravity. You want to file a patent for this idea in order to protect yourself. Whats the first step you will take?

You are right!, You will go to our favorite search engine www.google.com and search if someone else has already published a similar idea. If you do not find anything on google, you will most probably take further steps.

Given that you may take several months to start the patent process, you will keep google-ing till then using same search keywords.

Now if Google were Microsoft, they would have something that is described in the following 'Algorithm'.

Lets say you search with query q=xyz which fails.

result = select * from failed_searches where query=$q
if(result.count >= 5)
{
 potential_patent_idea(result);
}
else
{
 if($q not in database)
 {
  insert $q in failed_searches. set count to zero.
 }
 increment hit count for $q
}

function potential_patent_idea(result)
{
  $q = result.query;
  email = compose("subject=please consider this idea for our research", "body=$q");
  email.send("research-dept@microsoft.com");
}


Now, they are definitely quicker than you when it comes to IPR matters. Therefore do not trust the search engines.