Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Takes Pikachu To The Patent Office
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Amazon was awarded a patent for Search Query Autocompletion. From the Summary of the Invention--'For example, if Pokemon toys are currently the best selling or most-frequently-searched-for items within the database, the term POKEMON may be suggested whenever a user enters the letters "PO," even though many hundreds of other items in the database may start with "PO.'" See, Amazon practices the mantra "Gotta catch 'em all" with patents.
Amazon tries to patent:
Trolling is a art,
There has got to be prior art on this. Didn't Yahoo do this before 2000 (when the patent was filed)?
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
Does this make Google liable (or indeed, most search engines in general) if you type in an incorrectly spelt search, and it suggests an alternate?
This is so not gonna work unless they put a filter on it.
If going by search engine queries is any example, pokemon is not the most commonly searched for word that begins with po...
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
...but not for others. Great for entering URLs you've visited before or text messaging, but suh-ucks in word processing. Thanks, I can write a sentence (or in this case, 1 word) for myself.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
http://www.colonblow.com WARNING: The pics are not for the squeamish!
Someone patent searching for '*' and '%', which between them will cover all other searches! ...
3. Profit!
Unlike the other patents this does actually look like an original idea.
Well I'd have to say that there is a pretty good case for prior art on this one. I mean this is not too dissimilar from what web browsers have been doing for a few years now in the location tab (autocompletion of URLs)
Also, in mozilla you can define macros that can be accessed via the location bar. So I can type google foo to search google for foo. The next time I come along I will probably just have to get as far as google fo and it will complete my search parameter!
So there you go, mozilla has done it for at least a year. It even gives you suggestions, most popular at the top.
Another app that does it is my check tender on my palm pilot. It does this for payees...
Too bad most people will be scared off by court costs to argue the obvious. Oh well.
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
Listen Amazon, your website is slow enough - no need to slow it further by constantly pumping partial queries and results over the net.
Assuming you can get a patent on something as obvious as autocompletion. Whatever happened to not granting patents to the trivial, the almost-identical, and the prior-arted?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
While there may be hundreds in the database starting with PO...the only one I can think of right now is Pissed Off...
When will the patent madness ever end?
Everyone go there and search for goatse.cx!
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
My phone has done this for years on wap search engines, although admittedly it's not quite the same thing, it might be prior art
Even my Internet Explorer Address bar does popularity based auto-completion of search terms. This is just plain not an invention, unless they've done something more than that.
*sigh*
this actually looks like an inovation, taking the client side history autocompilet a step further by making it a server side history. un-like the 'one-click' buy junk.
The more abusive the Patent Office is in granting these absurd patents, the sooner the entire patent scheme will be abolished!
"God is dead." - Frederik Nietzsche
Implement this feature and I will stop using your service so fast it'll.... well it'll cause a .0000001% drop in your revenue.
Seriously though, what a terrible idea. I'm already going out of my mind in a righteous fury when Excel converts 2/24 into a date without asking me.
I'm going to see about getting a class action lawsuit together on the ground of increased blood pressure due to "frustrating features". Microsoft has deep pockets and there's all kinds of medical literature on the problems of stress to flood the court with.
is how companies get patents on things that everybody is already doing. Shouldn't a patent be done *first* (or at least, be pending),before they start doing/producing something? As it stands, IMHO it seems to be something else: i.e. "let's see what's not patented yet and patent it". Insane...
The ENIAC Demo Competition
So I guess the fact that web browsers (just to name one example) have done this for years doesn't count as prior art.
Let's see, I think we had our helpdesk application do this at an old company as well.
What other examples of auto-completing search boxes can we think of? I know dreamweaver auto-completes tags.
This is another typical BS patent and another example of why the patent office needs a major update in their procedures.
Are they going to be the Microsoft of Patents? It seems like literally every week I hear of Amazon getting or applying for another patent. To me (not being schooled in the patent rights) it seems like some of these are somewhat borderline - - as in I tend to ask myself is this something that should/needs to be patented? Also with all these patents that they own could they essentially stop selling/distributing and just collect money from tons of other companies using their patents?
Ave Molech Setting
Let me get this straight. This is what they patented, right?
:)
select * from items where name like 'PO%'
order by number_of_requests_last_week
I'm really glad that I'm studying to become an IP lawyer. The more stupid patents, the merrier
the pun is mightier than the sword
Isn't this similar to Internet Explorer's AutoComplete feature? Sure, IE's version isn't tied to a customer database, but knowing Amazon's track record, I wouldn't put it pass them to try to collect royalties off it.
Amazon vs. Microsoft. They should put that title bout on pay-per-view!
where the comment ends and sig begins
There must be hundreds of prior art. For example, URL autocompletion in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla fit the bill.
I am tempted to patent "patenting frivolous patents" as a business method. At least this way Amazon.com would have to come out of the closet and claim "prior art" (I wouldn't disagree with them).
Wow.. something apple or ibm hasn't already patented :)
telax - Just another vim and c hacker.
Now is Amazon going to start sueing Microsoft, Mozilla and others for using autocompletion in the address bar and forums?
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Isn't that "new" patent just the combination of form autocompletion and of a recommendation engine? I think there is plenty of prior art for both... I'm not sure: is it ok to patent the combination of two existing things? Well apparently it is OK with the USPTO...
Quick, must patent "Intake of Oxygen In Alveolae While Circulating Blood With a Biological Pump"!
I code, therefore I am.
The last frontier: patent the patenting process.
Sit back and watch the $$ roll in...
[rantMode=on] i'm going to patent masturbation/ then these eejts are going to have to pay me for something that i didn't think/ that's not a new idea and everyone's doing anyway people used to patent things like the light bulb or telephonic communication/ you know that things are getting bad then this is as good as it gets [rantMode=off]
You all are just mad that you didn't think of it (and patent it) first.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
When the user starts typing PO, obviously your first suggestion should be PORN :)
I stumbled across this patent when I was doing a research project on the history of software patents for my Intellectual Property Law class. It's a software patent written by (I'm guesssing) a porn site operator that automatically writes unique lewd descriptions for the hundreds of images on a porn site. Basically, the software asks basic questions about the image (how many people, what type of penetration, hair color, positions, etc.) and then it generates a racy text description. Don't know how well it works, but it's amazing what some people do with their time.
Amazon doesn't care if the patent can be canceled due to prior art. They'll strong arm other companies and many are bound to not put up a fight. If someone does, and the patent is later invalidated, then the max they'd lose would be to have to pay the original licensee back, I don't believe they'd have to pay any type of penalty on any fees collected. So they basically end up with a interest free loan, IF the thing gets invalidated. Not a bad downside. The way that the current patent system is setup, your much better off trying to patent everything, as even if a large number get punted, you'll probably make good money off the ones that don't (kinda like VC in the boom).
Can I name the guy down the record store as prior art? His auto-completion is pretty good when I ask, "What's that band that begins with PO that had a hit in ..."
Seriously though, it really does not qualify under "non-obvious". Maybe a "nice to have" for the users but it's just a hack (throwing some auto-complete data in the header and adding a couple of lines of Javascript). Definately not something that should be patentable.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Its not
"Where do you want to go today?"
It's
"Where do we want you to go today?"
"Last one in is a rotten goblin!" - Kepp
In my introductory class on elementary search analysis, the search listed other possibilities based on the first set of characters input then found set of matches and returned as possiblities in the order based on the number of entries listed per search, everyone whoever took that class should have prior art.
At first, I just read the slashdot summary of the patent and agreed with pretty much everyone else, that it was insane. After reading the patent abstract though, it does sound to be a bit more complicated than just auto-completion.
"A system for facilitating online searches suggests query autocompletion strings (terms and/or phrases) to users during the query entry process, wherein the suggested strings are based on specific attributes of the particular database access system being searched. A string extraction component associated with a database access system, such as a web site of an online merchant, periodically generates a dataset that contains the autocompletion strings for the system. The datasets are preferably biased to favor the database items that are currently the most popular (e.g., best selling or most frequently viewed), and may be customized to particular users or user groups. The datasets are transmitted to users' computing devices, which may include handheld and other wireless devices that lack a full keyboard. An autocompletion client which runs on the computing devices in association with a browser uses the datasets to suggest the autocompletion strings as users enter queries that are directed to the database access system. "
That doesn't mean I entirely agree with the patent but I don't think the slashdot summary is very clear.
It's the "Who do we like this week?" game-
MS - Still bad
IBM - Good, this week, check back next week
Linus - Good this week, insofar as I know
Oracle - ??? (profit or no profit)
Apple - Bad this week
Disney - Still bad
Amazon - Today they are bad, tomorrow..???
Okay, I'm done..who else has changed sides?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Now we're patenting "features" of software--behaviors even. How about Undo? Oooh, that's worthy of a patent. Or double-click to select a word, triple-click to select a sentence?
Pick any feature of any software system, and it's now fair game for patent. This means of course, in the future you'll have to get a licensing agreement from FubarU.com, the patent holder of the "Undo" feature.
What I wonder though, is it just pure malice that drives these humans to patent things like this? It certainly can't be business sense, since Amazon can't conceivably get any more online retail business by others not being able to use this feature on their retail sites. And it can't just be for license fees, since those may or may not ever come to fruition.
What ever happened to the good old days of insurance fraud, embezzlement, and plain old theft? At least those perpetrators had balls.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Pi-ka-CHU! (zap!)
They've patented a dictionary index. Does this mean they're going to sue the Oxford English Dictionary now?
How long has command completion been available in the Unix shell?
Congratulations, Amazon - every one of you is very fucking special. Now get on the short bus.
1) This isn't such a "IE did this first" issue. If you read the claims, the process calls for some more detailed analysis on the suggestion end- for example, culling out null results. It'd be the equivalent of IE not autocompleting to 404's, which we all know it still doesn't do.
2) Prior art from any time after their filing date in 2000 won't matter, so don't worry about what was going on "last year."
3) The examiner clearly considered mere autocompleting- look at the references cited during prosecution. PDA operating instructions are among them, which I imagine contained lots of "this device will complete your word for you."
4) Prior posters seem to be confusing "novelty" with "non-obviousness." I think it's pretty likely Amazon was among the first to use this invention as disclosed, but I'm willing to grant that any reasonable programmer turning his or her mind to this problem would have created a similar solution. But that doesn't mean it really has been done before.
Just imagine if personal injury lawyers started offering a service whereby they will patent your injury! Not only do you get compensation when you hurt yourself, you get royalty fees the next time someone hurts themself the same way!
..... wouldn't be much good if they could get taken to court over it, though!
I can think of a possible antidote to all this court mania, though. Has a retailer the right to refuse payment, even if it is made in pound notes, if it believes the money was obtained by some means it feels objectionable? I.E. can some methodist-run establishment legally refuse money won on the horses? By extension it would mean NO LAWSUIT MONEY signs in shops and restaurants
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Let me see, I had been programming for about a year or so when I wrote an interest-generating bank account program for my C64 for use during a game of Monopoly (heh). Each time you wanted to select an account, you press the first letter of the name, and if it was unique you got the full account name. If not, it just waited until it had a unique string. If a 15 year old programmer can sort out autocompletion, for himself, without prompting from anybody, after only a few months of programming, how can anybody possibly argue this is non-obvious to a practitioner (a requirement for a patent)?
liable though if I can wade through the legalease correctly...my M$IE does auto-complete AND searching
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This is obviously redundant, but I think it should be asked again.
Does anyone really care what the patent office produces anymore? I don't know of any programmer that sits there checking patents instead of trying to improve code or create new variations of an idea, be it that they had it or saw it somewhere.
Do these hardball schemes really effect anything outside of the war zone those companies already exist in? Don't tell me they don't already anticipate and expect these actions.
Dammit! Now I have to strike the 'order by' clause out of my SQL arsenal. What's next, 'group by'?
I got a patent on the characters a and A . Slashdot and Amazon.com are some of the evil doers that are doing infringement on my patent. I demand you stop using a and A! From now on, these sites should be known as Slshdot and mzon.com .
is far to general to have some sort of enforcement associated with it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems to be another waste of a patent by amazon.com?
Any fule nose that typing 'PO' will always autocomplete to 'PORN', no matter how popular Pokemon is at any one time.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
would seem like a natural application here. You sort all your query terms by frequency and assign the them to the shortest unique prefixes in that order. You then just travers down the tree with the suggested terms at each node as it is visited. But wait, doesn't autocompletion require full duplex communication. When did http get that?
This is a patent on searching to see which item in a database is most probably the match to a partial key and then returning it ahead of time. If this is patentable, someone should write software that analyzes your code, identifies every major algorithmic block, and compares each to a growing database of skeletons. If it's vaguely different, it should mark it as a potential patent. Every for loop you write may be an invention!
is frustrate people. for long things like email addresses and URL's it's very handy, but for such short things like search queries it will just get very annoying very fast. I never see search strings over 10 words/50 chars.
Of course, that's just my opinion.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
I understand what they are doing, and it's killing me. Stop this stinking ride, I want to get off. 1. Technicolor Yawn 2. Singing Lunch 3. Yelling Europe at the Toilet and the list goes on... THIS HAS TO STOP SOMEWHERE
It's rough, it's tough, and it takes no shit.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Pokimon or porn?
That's GNU/Masturbating.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
...waiting for the day Amazon tries to patent Microsoft Windows. Then we'll see all hell break out! (Gates vs. Beezo).
* grabs popcorn *
Isn't this nothing more than a process for auto-generating an synonyms list for any search engine? PO=Pokemon
Arg. How many people read the patent!? Or at least the abstract?
...suggested strings are based on specific attributes of the particular database access system being searched.
The relevant snippet says (I've added emphasis):
A system for facilitating ONLINE searches suggests query autocompletion strings...
WTF does this have to do with Mozilla or any orther client side app!??! Nothing! It is possible that this might be interpreted as searching a local application db for auto completions, but that's a stretch.
Look, we all know Amaz0n is a web based system, not a local system. So put away all the lame postings about autocompletion in browsers, shells, etc! You won't find prior art there. It must be found at the online db server level.
The strongest prior art case for this is a search engine BEFORE the patent was filed, which was 4/18/2000 - anything before that date can prob knock this one out.
And to further my rant, I find it apalling that anyone complaining about Amaz0n and their bullshit would still use their service. I'm sure there are plenty people out there who still do. It's actually a little difficult on holidays and birthdays to send people stuff online if you're boycotting Amz0n, but it's doable. I know, I've been doing it for quite some time and even pressuring my friends and relatives to do the same.
If you're strictly an end user who has nothing to do with online commerce, then this will never matter to you. However if, like me, you deal in the web commerce world, Amaz0n represents the biggest threat since m$. They are not your friend. They will try to patent every single idea they can get their hands on. The only way to stand against this is with your pocketbook and your voice. Use them both or suffer the consequences later down the line.
That was the best troll I've read all week.
Is that the way chinese writing software work? You start typing the first few characters and the most commonly used chinese character that fits what you type is selected?
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
After fighting with trying to allow normal users to mount hard drives,
Why? Users don't need to do that - sudo and mount them when necessary.
I tried to play some music. Redhat decided to remove MP3 support from XMMS. Fuck that.
Yes, this is old news. Redhat removed mp3 support from their distro's xmms in version 8. Go to rpmfind.net and download a different one.
I wanted to watch TV with my tuner card. So I try and modprobe it. The command doesn't exist. Insmod; same thing.
You bother checking your path? Normal users have to specify the location "/sbin/modprobe" etc. (or wherever it is).
I need to get on the web to look this shit up, so I try ifconfig to see if everything is running properly. Nah, ifconfig isn't there either.I am online, but I still don't know what my IP is.
See above.
After staying up way too late trying to solve dependency issues with ALSA, I try to put the PC in standby and go to bed. Nope, it tries to go into suspend mode, only to wake up seconds later.
Pissed off I slam the power button, and go to bed with a new found hatred for Redhat.
ALSA doesn't seem to be a Redhat issue. Why are you so concerned about standby? Redhat has nice graphical buttons for shutdown - no need to slam the power button.
QUITCHERBITCHIN!
Set up a cron job that posts "Patent system still fucked" once a week.
Oh, and something that automatically mods as "Redundant" all the "I think I'll patent " comments. Maybe a bayesian filter would do the job.
wasn't it built into csh or ksh prior to that? I believe that you're thinking about Bash's tab-complete (heck, emacs has it, ksh has it, so on and so forth)
What's different from "autocompletion of PO" and searching for "PO%"?
I want a clean colon!
RPM's are for pussies. Real men install everything using .tar.gz. On their Slackware box.
No, wait, that's too easy. Real men code their Linux from scratch. Without a compiler. Straight machine code. Input by ASCII.
Naturally, this prevents holding down a real job. So real men also live in their parents' basement. And priorities prevent time for useless things like girls. So real men masturbate. A lot. While looking at a picture of Stallman. Naked. Fucking that queer GNU ox mascot.
Any more questions?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Amazon also attempts to patent:
Patent Application 20040182-2774b[ii] - Fibrous cellulose sheeting for the removal of extraneous faeces from the exterior surfaces of corporate buildings.
They later discover that Microsoft and the RIAA are already in legal wrangling with simmilar applications
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Then, you may say, the addressbook already exists and thus the entries there are previous, but isn't that the case with the Pokemon example too? I mean, someone has already bought the Pokemon thing, and so, from the point of view of there system, it is previous.
For the record, this kind of behavior bothers me. But, they really are within the confines of the patent system.
All the prior art examples I've seen posted have been about autocompletion or searching a users previously entered text. They are taking this and expanding it to search the entered text of a group of users, giving the benefit of possible autocompetion of text you may have never typed.
Patents are supposed to do this. They exist so that someone can take someone's idea and exand on it. That's what they are doing. There very well me prior art on *their* idea, but so far all prior art has been on standalone autocomplete.
And now...I should say that this is just plain stupid. I never thought something like this should be patentable, but it is. It's the system's fault, and it needs to be fixed. And although they are within the confines of the system, they are just contributing to it's failings. Of course, that could have the effect of more evidence to its demise and rethinking by providing even more examples of misuse of the system.
RBY
No deal. Can't be done. Dunno about other nations, but the currency in the USA clearly states 'This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private', and that's fundamental to any (functional) national currency, whether they print it on it or not.
As a business it is MUCH cheaper for Amazon to patant its processes than to wind up being sued by some guy that patents things, like say, "windowing" to fix the y2k bug. Has Amazon tried going after other businesses for infringing on the patents? If they have, then my argument is void.
whether "nekked" or "nekkid" was more commonly used...
;-P
neked is
This Like That - fun with words!
in other words, if someone wanted to buy a new car using nothing but pennies, nickels, and dimes, you would HAVE to accept them as payment?
Nope, sorry, you can refuse service to anyone for any reason. If you know the money was gained through illegal (immoral, illicit, whatever) means, you don't have to sell to that person.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
> (I was having a debate with someone as to whether "nekked" or "nekkid" was more commonly used... no, really!)
1 =n ekked&q2=nekkid&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langu e=us
"nekkid" wins. See yourself:
http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q
It is also known in the art to provide an autocompletion tool that suggests completed text strings to the user as the user enters text. For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser automatically suggests completed URLs as the user enters text in the URL field; and the TextPlus.TM. for Palm tool suggests autocompletion words and phases (based on frequency of use) as users enter text within Palm Pilot.TM. applications. These tools generally operate based on text strings that have previously been entered on the particular PC, Palm Pilot, or other computing device. As a result, the tools generally are not helpful when the user enters a new term or phrase. One problem that is not fully addressed by the above and other known methods is that of reducing the number of keystrokes, voice commands, or other actions needed to enter a search query for searching a particular catalog or database, such as the products database of on online merchant. This problem is particularly important to users of handheld and other wireless computing devices that do not include full keyboards. The present invention seeks to address this problem.
Has anybody patented "Hello World!" yet? Just image the amount of revenue one could collect :)
While the patent was apparently issued, does it really mean anything?
Take the following situation as an example:
Suppose I invent the longer-lasting light bulb and successfully acquire a patent for it.
Does the patent prevent people from using such a light bulb while conducting business? Does a grocery store that uses the bulb to light their store during business hours have to pay royalties to me for using my patented technology? Or does it simply prevent the grocery store from creating and selling a knock-off of my light bulb?
In other words, so what if those morons got a patent? Can't anyone use the "technology" while conducting business as long as they don't try to sell it?
It seems to me that there's very little to lose in patenting something as obvious as this. Worst case, someone sues you and proves either prior art or that the patent is "patently obvious" and the patent is revoked (and licensing fees returned.) Is there any (serious) fines levied against companies who file these sorts of patents?
Can I sue a company for "pain and suffering" of having to deal with such annoying patents? Can I ask for a penalty award large enough to make the company think twice about filing such patents in the first place?
As an aside, the tag line of this article is out-and-out misleading. I can understand the desire to come up with "cute" taglines (as many news orgs do) but it shouldn't mislead the reader into thinking the article's about something it's not.
I'm fearing more and more that I'm going to get sued for something that I write.
really makes me want to go out and patent some nifty software idea just to see if it would go through
hooray! it's a sex wiki
Consider this... What if someone *else* patented this? No reason to believe that the USPTO wouldn't grant it to them as fast as they would to Amazon.
:-)
Wouldn't Amazon themselves then end up paying massive bucks in royalties? What business would be foolish enough to allow this to happen?
"If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't, paint it. If it's patentable, patent it."
Single user,
Maybe url autocompletion on a public computer would be a bit like the autocompletion amazon has patented.
Or IE/Mozilla/Konquror's auto complete on 's when your using google.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
starts with PO?
--Joey
AP Sunnyvale Ca. - Today, Mr Jeff Bezos, President and CEO of amazon.com announced that amazon.com is withdrawing his patent suit against Chinpokomon Japan Ltd. Mr. Bezos commented, "We had contacted Chinpokomon Japan Ltd to inform them of our civil action. But after my conversation with Mr. Hirohito, I now have a different perspective. Mr Hirohito assured me that I have a large bulbous penis. And that my penis, which is gargantuan in size, was much larger than his small Japanese penis." Mr Bezos later announced the sale of amazon.com to Chinpokomon Japan Ltd for 5c a share. Mr Hirohito, in a statement released this afternoon, stated that the assets of amazon.com will be sold off to fund the purchase of 22 surplus U.S. B52 bombers. The purpose of the bombers is unknown.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
What with increasing globalization, maybe the USPO is granting patents like crazy so there will be more American patents than foreign. Yeah, some countires can just ignore our patents, but countries like Iraq don't have any choice.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
'For example, if Pokemon toys are currently the best selling or most-frequently-searched-for items within the database, the term POKEMON may be suggested whenever a user enters the letters "PO," even though many hundreds of other items in the database may start with "PO.'"
Only thing I can think of that's a hotter sale item than Pokemon that starts with "Po" is Porn....so..if someone is looking for "Pokemon" and they get "porn" instead...is Amazon liable for targeting minors in the sale of age-restricted items?
A single SQL query == huge difference?
I guess that means that there is a huge difference between my but and your face.
Technically, yes. The USA legislated even pennies as legal tender in the 1950's, as I recall.
And you might be amused to note that there are many legal reasons why you cannot refuse service to some person. Refusing service based on race, for example. 'Whites Only' is not lawful anymore.
How is Amazon going to tweak the implementation so that every search doesn't suggest "porn"?
-- Dossy
Dossy's Blog
So does this mean the creators of grep have to pay royalties?
grep PO.* filename.txt
Is a clear violation of patent law!!!
I agree this patent is more about autofilling as advertising, to encourage impulse buys.
Not sure that's really what Amazon wants to do, though. They're already doing a ton of suggestive selling, what with "People who wear clothes also bought clean underwear from Target" lines on every search return. (Or is it, ulp, just mine??) At some point that's just a nuisance, like a cluttered cash wrap with too many crappy "suggestions." You filter it all out.
You use the grocery example. Well, bookstores mostly do use a single queue, to make everyone file past all the potential impulse items along it (rather than just the few at a given register). Maybe it's just me, but probably the grocery store's aware of how long and awkward a single line of carts would be (and seem) for shoppers. Imagine a stacked-up line of 14 gilled carts, complete with young kids leaning on half the cart handles. Ugh... Even if it went a little faster, it'd scare me off in a heartbeat. That's a bad feeling.
Popups telling me to buy Pokemon stuff might be in that area, for me.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
...as prior art. Why? Some of them place things like "po" at the top of the page, or keywords like "potlatch" which is just "po" with the rest of a word on the end of it. Instead of being biased in favor of sales, it's biased in favor of alphabetical order and divisions in the dictionary, but it's essentially the same thing as what Amazon does. The only difference is that Amazon puts it on the web. Actually... I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least *one* online dictionary that did something like that before Amazon. Spellcheckers in word processors have been doing it for how many years? (though not on the web).
Bottom line? YACP (Yet Another Crank Patent). True fact: The crank was actually patented around the time that James Watt built his first steam engine. Some engines were actually designed with less efficient combinations of gears and linkage assemblies so as to achieve the results of a crank without violating the crank patent. You could also say that this patent is a "crank patent" in the sense that some phone calls are "crank calls". Actually... perhaps the "violators" could fail to respond to Amazon and state in their defense that this was so ridiculous they assumed it was a crank phone call/letter/fax or whatever.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Amazon can now ask its vendors (for a small fee, of course) if they'd like to be the suggested word or phrase in a partial query.
So what about a compromise: Say six months or a year on software or IP patents with no renewability. The justification is obvious: devleopment and communication is much higher today, and we want to keep it that way. This way if a company comes up with a novel idea, they get to profit off of it for a year, and recoup some of their development expenses (ahem). And the idea goes back into the public arena after a reasonable time removing the mafia aspect of software patents.
Comments?
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
http://www.dell.com/us/en/gen/corporate/patent.htm
....a bunch of JavaScript memory hogging arrays will need to be loaded each time I visit Amazon.com.
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Type a url into into konqueror, mozilla, netscape, or the piece of shit browser. It's autocompleted based upon recent popular requests.
:-)
Hit tab in Zsh(my favorite), Bash, etc. That autocompletes based upon possible values.
Autocompletion that orders upon request is a trivial improvement, especially in a server-side environment where "sharing between users" really means "ignoring $userid".
I have a new version that sends a list of the top 50 completion terms with the page rather than checking everything when needed. I expect my patent for it oon enough.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Piiiiiiiikkkkkaaaaaaaccchhhhhuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!! !!!!!!!
that makes much more sense :) The patent requires the backend DB system....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Yeah, keep 'em comin' Amazon. Pretty soon patents will be as worthless as say...the Canadian Dollar? And probably as equally ignored.
What are they going to do?
patent on search autocompletion?
Don't know if this is more ridiculous than the "one click buy" patent-
pff
I am going to patent a speaching method wich consists of putting one letter after the other thus creating conceptual blocks. I'll call this blocks "words(TM)" and the method "alphabet"
Someone here must have lost contact with reality..
Please someone (else) stop this office.-
"PO amazon sucks" is now the most searched term on amazon.com. PO might also stand for this "henry potter" stuff.
Did the author of this article really have to link to pokemon.com?
Not only is pokemon not popular anymore (which means it wouldn't be a best selling item on Amazon,) it is completely irrevelent. Even if the author was talking about somthing popular like say GameCube for example, a link is completely unnecessary.
Whats with that?
This is not a troll, its a serious complaint.
something thats been done before, my first thought was "hey my PDA has been doing that for years" (and yes, before year 2000), as you type out a word it popped up likely words which seemed to be ordered from most used to least used.
Sounds like what was described so far, except its a general purpose thing, no related to 'online search queries' specifically.
After reading it though, the key bit seems to be the actual sending of the keyword listing, so while my PDA might have a list of "porn, pokemon, potatoes" as that list of words starting with "po", it could also query the dataset "'pooh and tigger','posh spice diet guide',potting" that was sent by the search application.
New and innovative... I dunno
Interesting... this patent is similar to a patent from Nokia ( i think ) to accelerate typing. It uses a dictionary ( and probably a system for ranking higher the more used words ) to forecast the following letters or the all word meant to be typed on the keyboard on a mobile phone.
I see the amazon "patent" as an application of the original Nokia (?) patent
So, it should logically be rejected by a court ( but IANAL and there are big bucks involved... )
That feature's been in the MS IME for years.
I just can't help myself. Every time I hear someone say the word 'Pikachu,' my gut-level reaction is to offer them a Kleenex and say 'Gesundheit.'
I know, I know... Probably off-topic... There go my karma points (again).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Any patent is possible so long as it doesnt already exist.
I would suggest some prior art here.
I developed an entry suggestion system in 1994 or 95. In my system I looked for a correlation between the previous answers to other questions, and then offered a pull down of ranked choices.
Something like this.... if somebody goes to the DVD page, they could load the Top 50 DVDs into a JavaScript Array. And every time the user adds a character to the search field, it would look to that array and see how many titles match what the user has typed so far. When they're down to only one match, they pop the rest of the title into the search box and, in a perfect world, they would auto-select the autocompleted portion so that, if the user continues typing, it will erase the autocompleted portion.
For example, let's say (as a really lame, quick example) that you have two titles in the array:
The user enters...
"The Hand That Ro"...
and nothing shows up yet, because the "system" (ha!) doesn't know what title you're going to enter. But as soon as you enter the "c" in the word "Rocks", it only has one left and it autocompletes "ks the Cradle".
It's a reasonably good idea (not a great idea, but decent), and it DEFINITELY shouldn't be patentable, because it will become the SECOND thing (that I know of) that I, as a web developer, am prohibited from doing for my customers by law (the first is One-Click, Amazon's first silly little software patent).
Just my USD 0.02
Their database. They are keeping track of search queries and using that info to create the autocomplete strings. So that makes it COMPLETELY MANIPULATABLE!!! If you can get enough people to put in a specific query enough times over a couple of days, you should be able to lock in whatever you want. Just gonna take a LARGE group of people with skills since you'll have to get rid of ALL cookies as well as use a lot of different proxies to log unique page hits and queries from different IP's and computers. Probly work best if you can get groups and proxies on the coasts first since that's where a lot of trends and runs come from. At least this is what I gathered from the patent text. It'll at least give them a headache for a little while.....have fun kids and play nice!
I read the comments and all I hear is
'blah blah amazon blah patents blah blah complain because i'm not running the company blah blah blah'
Weirdly, Microsoft themselves may have prior art on Amazon's predictive auto-complete in their Visual Studio .NET programming environment. As you start to type a line of code, it pops up a select list of potential matches. You can then use the cursor keys or mouse to pick the one that you want and hit TAB to auto-complete your line...
quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Perhaps CowboyNeal should just change the "Flamebait" moderation to "I disagree" and have done with it...
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
everything is included (drivers and shit)
More of the latter...
I notice when I am typing a word in, it does autocomplete on the most frequently done word in the document, even if it's not in a dictionary.