[Sigia-l] "best bets": trademarked? other names?

[Avi Rappoport]

At 8:06 AM -0400 9/26/02, Bill VanLoo wrote:
>Now, when I'd first heard of these from Lou Rosenfeld, he mentioned that
>"Best Bets" originated at Microsoft. My question: does Microsoft own a
>patent or trademark on this technique or the name "Best Bets"? If not, I'd
>like to call ours "Best Bets" in hopes that users will be familiar with the
>term from other sites (read: microsoft.com). If they do own a
>trademark/patent, I'll gladly take suggestions for alternate names.

Just more data points: Google calls them "KeyMatch" and Inktomi 
Enterprise Search calls them "QuickLinks", AskJeeves has had them 
forever.

I call them "manual recommendations" and I'm always looking for more 
examples:  <http://www.searchtools.com/analysis/recommendations.html>.

Avi
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