There's a patent our there for just about any conceivable thing in computing. I'm pretty sure commenting on HN articles is patented and we're in violation right now. It's so ridiculous. No can ever really do anything with most of them (except maybe troll companies with deep pockets or if you're building a phone). I remember that 5 years ago when building a company people would still ask whether you had patents. I don't think they still do, but those are just my impressions.
"Nadav holds multiple patents in areas of social mobile networking, machine learning, network algorithms, and sensor technologies. His work has been featured in both academic and popular press (Technology Review, Businessweek.com, Wall Street Journal, Wired UK, and The Associated Press, among others), and received awards of recognition (including Best and Distinguished Paper awards, Knight News Challenge, SXSW Accelerator, IPSN Extreme Sensing Competition, and three Google Research Awards)."
But at least these seem to be patents that did require some effort, were novelties at the time and appear to be useful – otherwise that list of awards would be a list of awards you don’t want to receive.
There is nothing wrong with patenting truly new, truly sensible solutions to actual problems, in my opinion. The problematic patents are the trivial ones that currently swamp the software industry.
That's one of the issues though. Which patents are the "truly new" ones and which are the "trivial ones"? It seems like many software patents seem obvious in hindsight, a few years down the road, but they were not obvious at the time of invention.
Google's actions in this area speak for themselves. Even in the few instances where they have been involved in patent infringement cases on the "offensive" side, the suits have been quite obviously defensive in nature (eg. the suit vs British Telecom).
The nature of reality as it applies to patent law is why I don't fault companies for acquiring lots of patents, but do fault them when they use those patents offensively. Google remains among the very few large tech companies I respect when it comes to patent actions.
The fact that they're not on the offense is not really meaningful. Most of the value of property and contractual rights is prospective. I bet Google has never sued someone for planting a farm on their campus lawn--that doesn't mean they're indifferent to the existence of that property right.
Google acquires a lot of companies for their IP. Not so they can sue people for infringing on it, but so they can use it. The property rights create a legal structure that allows those kinds of transactions to happen. Like with any other property right, that's the value of a patent--giving people a "thing" in which they can transact, which they can book as an asset, etc. Ideally, a lawsuit only happens when things go sideways.
