Yahoo Receives News Feeder Patent

Yahoo (YHOO) recently received a Dynamic Page Generator patent which appears to firmly protect Yahoo's core service of a user-selected home page that delivers real-time information from sources around the web.

Yahoo's potential reach with this patent could be quite broad, including many similarly featured companies such as Google, Bloglines, Netvibes, Rojo, Dapper, Pageflakes, NewsGator, LifeIO, as well as over about twenty or so young, budding web 2.0 news aggregator sites, even one that just recently launched. With so many intruders to Yahoo's core business in serving up news related, ad-sponsored web pages, this patent marks a newly minted set of ownership rights for Yahoo dating back to 1997 which are sure to be reviewed intensely for prior art by the software crowd.

How, or even if, Yahoo will enforce this patent has yet to be seen, but Yahoo hasn't been idle when having to face the likes of Google. In fact, Yahoo grew its stake in Google (GOOG) by roughly 2.7 million shares when they fought over Yahoo's pay-per-click patents.

Disclosure: Author has no position in YHOO or GOOG.