I did a vanity search last night on the patent office’s published application database looking for some patents I’ve submitted. I came across a lot of patents submitted by Strategic Patents, P.C.

The name itself screams patent troll. Trolls are people (often lawyers) who submit patent applications with no intention of ever innovating or delivering a product – the intent is purely to use this country’s broken patent system to extort money from the real innovators.

Strategic Patents has submitted at least 35 patent applications with names like “User transaction history influenced search results“, “MOBILE SEARCH RESULT CLUSTERING” and”Location influenced search results“. If these patents are granted, they would threaten the businesses of Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and many emerging mobile services from companies like Medio and JumpTap.

Their patent applications cite another Rakesh Agrawal, formerly at IBM and now at Microsoft. Rakesh has done a lot of interesting work in text analysis, data mining and search.

(If you’re trying to Google me, know that there are at least three other Rakesh Agrawals who Google likes more than me. How about a little link love?)