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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...
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
Someone patent searching for '*' and '%', which between them will cover all other searches! ...
3. Profit!
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.
When the user starts typing PO, obviously your first suggestion should be PORN :)
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.
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.
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.