You can't patent something that has been publicly disclosed, including disclosure by yourself. Commercial use counts as disclosure.<p>This was filed June 18, 2004, so given the one year grace allowed under US law, if Google made <i>commercial use</i> of this system before June 18, 2003, then they cannot patent it.<p>I'm pretty sure Google used distributed map-reduce from the beginning... so I'm thinking that this patent must cover a refined method that differs in some way from their initial approach.<p>It's a lot of work to read and understand a patent (I spent a couple of days on one this week), so if anyone else wants to do so and let us know what the patented algorithm actually is...