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Amazon Takes Pikachu To The Patent Office

Posted by Hemos on from the it's-not-"would-be-nice-to-catch-them-all" dept.

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.

2 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Prior Art? by dejaffa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There has got to be prior art on this. Didn't Yahoo do this before 2000 (when the patent was filed)?

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    There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
  2. hmmm... prior art? by pngwen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.