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.

Comments

Re:hmmm... prior art?

[Elvisisdead]

The only exception is that browsers autocomplete based on a previous entry rather than based on speculation about what it thinks you're looking for.

Re:Google

[rherbert]

Actually, it's not just a simple spell check. I can't find any current examples, but when you used to search for "nekked", Google would say, "Did you mean nekkid?" (I was having a debate with someone as to whether "nekked" or "nekkid" was more commonly used... no, really!)

It probably has more to do with the number of hits that a similarly-spelled word word has - if there are a lot more for that one than the current one, it makes a suggestion.

Re:What a waste of bandwidth

[goon america]

This happened.

Traditionally, patent protection was awarded only to technical inventions, such as light bulbs, shavers, medicines and so on. New financial techniques or ways of selling things were often explicitly excluded in patent laws. As electronic commerce became more popular, new ways of selling things were offering services over the Internet were developed. Since these new business methods involved computers, communication systems and other technical things, many inventors in this field tried to obtain patent protection. The 1998 State Street Bank decision in the USA ruled that patents on business methods were as valid as any other type of patent. The combination of these two of events resulted in an explosive growth of the number of business method patents.

Which led to this.

Re:Prior Art?

[zCyl]

There has got to be prior art on this.

1. /bin/grep
2. /usr/bin/locate
3. Browser url autocompletion
4. Every spellchecker since the invention of dirt, which queries a dictionary listing.
5. Every wordprocessor which autocompletes words you're typing with what it thinks is the most likely candidate.
6. Every computer-based card catalogue which allows you to search for part of a title.

Oh, I'm sorry, was applying the idea to toys new and original?

Re:Innovotive.

[GreyPoopon]

I know you're a troll but come on, try a little bit harder next time.

Not that I think this should be patented, but...

What appears to make this original is the combination of two things.

1. The autocompletion takes place AS you are typing in the query term, rather than after you hit "Search."
2. The autocompletion algorithm takes into account searches performed by other users in determining which completion to suggest.

As such, this is not like wildcard searches, nor is it like the Google suggestions. And it is not like autocompletion that uses a static dictionary. They also appear to be targeting this idea towards wireless devices without a keyboard.

Re:hmmm... prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a lot of patents cited as prior art by the US patent Office in this case :

US5675819 Xerox Document information retrieval using global word co-occurrence patterns

US5845300 Microsoft Method and apparatus for suggesting completions for a partially entered data item based on previously-entered, associated data items

and : US5864805,US5897622,US5995928,US6006225,US6029141, US6144958,US6169986,US6185558,US6208339,US6223059, US6230173,US6266665,US6307549,US6370527,US6374241, US6377965,US6392640,US6401084,US6401085,US6421675, US6430553,US6466918,US6489968

Amazon did not get a patent for autocompletion in general... they got it only for a particular case and they cannot enforce it except for a slight difference with prior art...

The office has to give a patent when there is a little, inventive difference with prior art even if all the rest seems really obvious. But they always obtain protection only on this small inventive part.

Look,

[nagora]

Just stop buying from Amazon. It's simple: they are stealing your ideas and reducing your chance to make a living from your own work. So perhaps it's not a great idea to KEEP GIVING THEM YOUR MONEY!

TWW