Indian Patent Office Refuses Patent For Face Book’s Application Crawler

On 24^th March, 2015¹ the Indian Patent Office refused a patent for Facebook's application Crawler. An application for patent numbered 4436/DELNP/2007 titled "METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR AN APPLICATION CRAWLER" was filed by the applicant Truveo Inc., which is a search engine for Internet videos. The said patent application was later assigned to Facebook by the way of Form-6 (Change in Applicant).

Crawler can be defined as an algorithm based software that visits web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have such crawlers that are programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated.