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Amazon Patents User Viewing Histories

Posted by timothy on from the uspto-is-just-trying-to-distract-you-from-scotus dept.

Chris Cleveland writes "Yet another astounding patent from the USPTO. I was browsing the patent database, and discovered that Amazon received a patent today on using customer viewing histories to generate recommendations. If a customer views product A, and then later views product B, and you use that to infer a relationship between A and B, then you've infringed on this patent. This patent is a continuation of an earlier patent (#6,317,722) on using shopping carts to generate recommendations. When will this stupidity end?"

1 of 430 comments (clear)

  1. recommendations, circa 1999 by yppiz · · Score: 5, Informative
    As one of the references cited by the patent (US Pat. 6,691,163), I think I can make an informed comment on it.

    At the time the patent was filed, it was extremely uncommon for systems to make automatic recommendations based solely on the behavior of users. When I did my work at Alexa Internet (which was acquired by Amazon) in the late 90s, I had to solve a number of issues which had not been dealt with, both from an engineering perspective and from a quality of results perspective -- few companies, and no academic researchers that I am aware of -- had both the amount of data and the technical talent required to process it in order to test and refine recommendation systems based on transactional information.

    My work in this area became Amazon's "customers who shopped for X also shopped for Y feature." Greg Linden, the first name on this patent, is now doing interesting recommendation work with his site Findory.

    --Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu / blog / pics.