Between its initial incorporation on September 4, 1998 and January 1, 2001, Google Inc. applied for 20 patents, and over the next four years for another 428. From 2005 to 2008, the number of patent applications filed by Google more than doubled, reaching 1,044 by the beginning of 2008. There’s a story to tell about why Google decided enter the patent game and how its desire “to organize the world’s information” became a legal project to defend its data empire and fend off threats to its unmatched Index. In The Code of Capital, Katharina Pistor outlines one element of this story

As I read through the the first several years of this material, one patent, in particular, crystalized those early years for me: No. 7,912,915 B1. On April 30, 2001, Sergey Brin filed to patent “Systems and Methods for Enticing Users to Access a Web Site”:

The present invention relates generally to client-server networks and, more particularly, to systems and methods that provide mechanisms for attracting users to a site on a network. Today, many operators of websites on the Internet use animated images, such as animated Graphic Interchange images (GIF), in webpages to make the web pages more dynamic and visually appealing to users.  The philosophy is that if the webpages are visually appealing, then they users will visit the site often. 

Brin patented the Google doodle, and called it a “system and method” for enticing users to return to a web page.