Firm that owns a patent on searching databases over the Web sues local Web companies

A firm with no apparent Web site of its own that holds a patent it claims gives it ownership of a way to index information stored in online databases is suing two local companies for patent infringement.

At issue in Spider Search Analytic's suit, filed this week in US District Court in Boston, is software that HubSpot and Gift Hero use to collect and analyze "Deep Web" data only available through database queries, rather than through "static" Web pages. HubSpot, based in Cambridge, provides marketing and sales support for small businesses; Gift Hero, based in Burlington, lets users set up online wish lists.

The Plano, TX company has also filed suit against Sears, CareerBuilder and other companies in federal court in Texas.

In its suits, the company claims the software used by HubSpot and Gift Hero is in particular violation of this clause of its patent:

A method for building a deep web crawler, comprising: utilizing scout crawling rules to collect dynamic pages; utilizing an analyzer and extractor to determine underlying structure of queries; generating instructions for a harvester, wherein the harvester provides requests to a server and collects available pages from the server.