Search engine company Google has bought over 1,000 patents from IBM this month.

The purchase is expected to improve Google’s defences against future patent litigations.

As Google’s Android OS for smartphones has gained popularity, the search engine company has found itself in focus for patent infringement by its competitors.

Google told the New York Times, "Like many tech companies, at times we’ll acquire patents that are relevant to our business needs. Bad software patent litigation is a wasteful war that no one will win."

Recently, Google failed to win in its bid to buy more than 6,000 patents from the bankrupt Canadian communications equipment maker Nortel Networks.

Nortel’s approximately 6,000 patents included those in wireless, 4G, semiconductor and data networking IP technologies.

Google had bid $900m for about 6,000 of patents put up for sale, but it lost out to a group of competitors that included Apple and Microsoft, which offered $4.5bn in cash.

The search engine company had said in its blog that the move to buy patents from Nortel was a defensive measure against patent litigation.

The company hoped that having a large number of patents will give it the flexibility to develop more products and services.

Google had said, "But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services."

"Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories."

In April this year, a Texas jury had ruled that in using Linux on its back-end servers, Google had infringed a patent held by Texas-based Bedrock Computer Technologies and must pay $5m in compensation.

Bedrock had sued Google and other companies including Yahoo, Amazon, PayPal and AOL — claiming the companies infringed a patent filed in January 1997 by using various versions of the Linux kernel on their servers.