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Amazon Patents Including a String at End of a URL
theodp writes "On Tuesday, Amazon search subsidiary A9.com was awarded U.S. patent no. 7,287,042 for 'including a search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.' In the Summary of the Invention, it's explained that 'a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels, where domain_name is a domain name associated with the web site system.' Here's the flowchart that helped cinch the deal."
I'm not sure they even LOOK at patent applications anymore.
Shinma
Isn't there a Drupal module that already does this?
-Myke
I have patented putting characters in an ordered sequence. I'm calling it a SENT-ENCE. I'd ask for your thoughts on it, but I will of course need royalties.
TODO - Insert Creative/Witty Signature
Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.
Having said that, is it innovative? I certainly never thought of doing it before I saw others do it. I was always happy with having it after a ? and typically formatted it so it was easier to get the information out of it. When I first saw it I thought to myself "Huh, that's pretty nifty, I wonder how they did it?"
As terrible as their one-click patent was, I think this might be a valid patent (as valid as any software patent can be anyway).
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
The php website has done this for ages when searching functions. I am sure they have been doing it before 2004.
eg.
http://www.php.net/stupid%20patents
Please firebomb your nearest patent office.
It's not a bad idea, but is it really patent worthy? Is no one else already doing this (prior art)?
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Surely there are loads of examples of mod_rewrite doing this kind of thing?
...or does that patent look like it expects everyone to start formatting URLs with a double-slash to *not* search... http://slashdot.org//index.pl anyone?
Robin
I'm patenting a method where you click on a link and yo return a '404' for the first five minutes the link is avaialable. You leave some kind of message indicating you should try again, thereby increasing page views and advertizing rates.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
How is this not an obvious use of apache mod_rewrite??
I'm willing to grant that the patents reviwers are probably too overloaded to be able to thoroughly search, or even to be all that savvy on all matters technical... But there really needs to be a better system for determining prior art - a way for them to put up a website saying: "hey, has anyone ever thought of using a pre-definined character in a url before?"
And then when that server crashed under the deluge they'd know that someone probably had.
It doesn't help that companies actually encourage their staff (this is a mobile phone company I'm referring to) _not_ to check for themselves before submitting a patent application. The reasoning was somethign along the lines of: if you know prior art exists then we can't legally make the submission, but if you don't know then we just might get the patent.
"And that solves the mystery of the missing ring" - Bender
While in some ways this story is a dupe of the , "Some fuckwit given exclusive right to picking noses in an obvious way" story that seems to run every second day, the US does need to do something about this in the short to medium term as it is having the opposite effect to that intended by the framers of the original patent legislation through being inappropriately applied to things wich are either not original or not inventions.
I fully expect to see a large contingent of genuinely innovative tech companies moving HQ over to Europe and refusing to offer patent indemnity for their USian users in the medium term if this sort of crap continues.
Stop this madness now as they say.
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
for (int i=1; i<rfc.length(); i++) {
patent("rfc" + i);
}
profit();
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
get enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters and somewhere along the line this kind of drivel comes spooling out.
--- This meme is memory intensive
Similar implementations have already been done.
/search/blah...
/invoice/# or invoice/customer/[name or number] or search for customers using similar techniques.
.htaccess file that does a rewrite to a single catch-all if the requested URL does not exist. The app can then parse the request and infer what the user really wants, whether it's an action of a controller, a query or similar.
With Ruby on Rails, it uses a similar technique for discovering actions. It even has facilities for creating custom URL maps so what would normally come across as ?search=blah would get converted into
del.icio.us uses that for tag search (ie: http://del.icio.us/username/blah).
For my internal invoicing system that I wrote in PHP (but never finished), you could search for invoices by going to
The trick involves a
Although I've never seen this specifically applied to search (a la google), it's been used for filtering with tags (like del.icio.us).
stupid software patents.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Well, Wikipedia didn't find anything at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Including_a_search_string_at_the_end_of_a_URL_without_any_special_formatting so I guess it must be a novel idea. Oh, wait ...
So then how can a person with little or no money to throw at software can keep up with all hoops and processes of the law? This is how computers and programming evolve... copying and sharing of ideas. So the U.S. government just wants monopolies to form. Just screw the free-market system, screw the consumer, and screw the citizens that the U.S. is suppose to protect. Protect the interests of corporations at the expense of citizens' freedoms? George Bush needs to go.
That is why software patents need to disappear, since all someone has to do is come up with a flowchart, and the idea can be patented. And what makes one think that the flowchart is even accurate to the idea that the program expresses? Copyright law is ENOUGH protection. Copyrighting the code is enough.
Want to lock ideas up and stall innovation and take away freedoms of the people via taking away freedoms of the programmer? Just keep on doing what the U.S. is doing with software patents. Another step in the direction of the U.S. becoming the next U.S.S.R.
----
Bill Gates Supports Planned Parenthood - http://prolifepc.com/
This slide from a talk delivered in January 2003 describes the same idea of searching by URL content (listed under "Interesting Uses"). I don't remember being particularly surprised by the idea at the time, so I'm sure there's considerably older prior art, but this was the first thing that sprang to mind.
(Ignore the date on the top right, which always shows today -- the talk's date of January 22, 2003 is listed on the PHP talk index.)
Only, wikipedia search for the string in the URL is an option that is one click away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't%20it%20true
If you ask me I'd use the wikipedia way, or the good old search box.
Because if you're typing into the address box in a browser, you're likely to have autocompletion. That means you're likely to start a search whenever you want to get back at the site, bad for the search engine.
Also your searches are accessible through your browsing history - as for all searches through get requests I think.
Having said that, this patent differs from the prior art of wikipedia by simply doing an additional step automatically. Where's the innovation, USPTO guys?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
The only way to get a reaction from boorish behavior in this industry is to hit someone in the wallet.
Don't like this seeming madness? Easy: don't shop at Amazon or any of its affilates.
Maybe they'll stop filing these things.
Perhaps there should be additional legislation that says that patent trolls, having been outed by prior art, should be forced into receivership. There's no spanking these satanic IP holders.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior Art ?
Yes, with the ugly space in there wiki will ask you if you want to search for prior art. If you're smart enough to replace spaces with underscores, you'll get there on the first try.
Did they just patented mod_rewrite??? Tue Aug 24 06:55:44 1999 UTC (8 years, 2 months ago) baby! http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/mappers/mod_rewrite.c?revision=83751&view=markup&pathrev=573831
In C, you have to declare variables. In Python, the interpreter figures them out. It seems like the same thing to me. Amazon has patented passing a variable without explicitly declaring that it is a variable.
Amazon.Com patents selling things on-line.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
for obviousness comes through. It's gonna be so awesome.
"I wish to God these calculations would have been made by steam." -Charles Babbage
Pssh. Why is everyone giving Amazon a hard time.
Give it a REST.
I think the owners of Slashdot should patent: A method for fanboi's to digitally express their opinion without proper knowledge, or even reading referenced information.
...for years, we've been trying to explain to the clients that spaces have no place in URLs, and these yoinks go an' mess it all up...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
When you apply for a patent, that's the day the prior art becomes effective. So if wikipedia did it after they filed, then that prior art would not count. Not saying it is not a stupid patent, but just wanted to point out, as a general rule, these things can take 5+ years to become live, so sometimes prior art comes around after a company starts using the patent-pending technology and others copy it.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Uhh... it's not that hard to do.... I've been doing it on sites I build by using a custom 404 page that grabs the url string and explodes it into parts (whether it's a single string or a / delimited url) and passes it to the site search with the end result being a page that says, Sorry we couldn't find what you're looking for, here are some possible matching pages." Then a list of search results with the string components as keywords.
This is certainly a useful thing to provide to your users as an error page but from a usability POV, you shouldn't be directing people to search this way. It's unintuitive and confusing to have multiple paths to do a search.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I think one could argue that it is merely a rearrangement of known methods such as mod_rewrite in order to produce a predictable result.
This known method->predictable result has been established via case law as an indication of obviousness that would be necessary in order to invalidate a patent claim.
This patent is just an embarrassment for The USPTO, the primary examiner Chong H Kim, Amazon/A9, and the so called inventors of this patent, i.e. Jassy; Andrew R. (Seattle, WA), Manber; Udi (Palo Alto, CA), Leblang; Jonathan (Menlo Park, CA). Funny fact: this patent's filing date is August 23, 2004; so it has taken the USPTO three years to examine it!
/. agrees that Amazon & Co are our new patent trolling overlords, yes?
So
It doesn't appear to have been granted yet. I imagine it's probably at "search" stage wherein the search examiner has issued their preliminary report with citations.
... anyone want to cite documentary evidence from before 3 March 2004.
Anyhow Google URLs are acknowledged prior art. The idea is to use simply a free-form string of 1 or more words to perform a search. Wikipedia isn't a spot on citation (though it would help to refine the main claims) as, for example, "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/write an article" simply leads to a page which allows a search to be performed. Granted that's not a huge inventive step but in such a well worked field it is significant.
What I'd be considering is for example the use of mod_rewrite (or similar) to perform a "search" in alternate directories if a file is not found with the specified name. At least the claims would need to be more specific as to what constitutes a "search".
So wikipedia isn't a spot on citation
I think these patents are so obviously flawed, they will be challenged and overturned the minute they try to enforce it. I have a hunch Amazon knows it too and they will use it only to brag, "We have a portfolio of 123 patents" as part of their presentations to investment brokers and stock analysts. But still, we definitely need some form of patent reform.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Path info is the information beyond the end of a URL. I've often used extra text at the end of a URL to search or check which page. I'm not sure when Apache's PATH_INFO variable was first introduced, but I first started using it back in 1998 I believe. Lately I have had a better idea, AliasMatch. I use that directive use a single script to front either an application or an entire site, or even multiple sites.
AliasMatch "^/[^\.]*$" "/some/php/file.php"
Within PHP you can choose a page to display based on the URL called, or you can display a search page if nothing is found.
I'll have to see if I can locate an good prior art to match this. I sure hope this 1-Search patent does not have to stand for long.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
Filed: August 23, 2004 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=7,287,042.PN.&OS=PN/7,287,042&RS=PN/7,287,042
TODO create witty sig.
Flowcharts can be very useful and convincing.
Sorry... Does anything more need to be said?
OK, lets talk inflation.
Inflation of the money supply, inflation of grades, inflation of patent numbers, inflation of job titles...
It's really all the same thing. The more there is of something the less any individual item is worth. Money, grades, patents. Yet the vast majority seem to have some significant difficulty with that concept. More is better than less. Thing is, you don't actually have more, you have less but with a bigger number. Interesting. I wonder if there's a level of I.Q. where people simply can't understand that concept... Maybe they'll be happy when they earn a zillionty dollars per year each, have a PhD and are titled "Captain of the World".
By creating thousands, tens of thousands of patents you aren't actually producing anything of value, you're simply throwing doubt on the value of all patents.
Real value is relatively unrelated to inflation. The economy only grows for real (real stuff like chairs, tables, cars) at a couple of percent a year. Real academic achievement is still hard, only a small proportion are up to it and only a small number of patents are really innovative and being captain of the world doesn't help much if you are still sweeping streets.
Essentially, inflation is deceit. People who inflate are at the very best, liars and more usually swindlers planning fraud.
Deleted
I don't care about those patents, they don't affect me (yet). But I just love the style with which they are illustrated. That flow-chart is beautiful.
Software patents bad. Software patent drafters though...
-1 not first post
It's a given that big corporate entities like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and all the others are going to try to patent everything they can. It's been discussed here before, and it's just a cold war effect -- if you're the only company NOT trying to patent everything, you lose. It's a dumb way to run a world, but there you go.
...
But the USPTO is the problem. Granting a patent like this just reinforces the grabby, greedy behavior of the big companies and creates an environment where companies are pitted against each other not in services or products but in ownership of intellectual property. If my company can get the edge in my industry by patenting something my competition uses (prior art be damned), there are going to be a bunch of businesspeople and attorneys within my company (not to mention shareholders) who are going to insist I file the patent. It's up to the USPTO to call bullshit on these things, and it's not doing it.
Not to mention that the big companies seem to get these things to go through while little guys seem to come up empty when they try to do it. If you have enough attorneys, you can pretty much do anything anymore. But that's a rant for another day
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Passing it unformatted is a lot less complicated than coming up with some clever coding system which possibly adds functionality.
If I want my application to search for a string, I would pass that string to it unmodified unless I had reason to do it otherwise. I wouldn't convert it to Chinese and back - that would be difficult.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
This is the second best invention after the one-click-shopping.
That URL searches for packages that contain gcc in the name. No special formatting required.
It's been done that way for at least 6 years. Probably more like 8.
Why do these people waste our time with such drivel?
YAAC
Yet Another Anonymous Coward
I can just type in a search term into my address bar and it does a search automatically. If I read this, they mean you could type: www.amazon.com/rambo dvd set And it would search amazon.com. That's all well and good but sounds like it's obvious (and the flow chart proves that).
www.wildpad.com
Don't click that URL, it violates a patent!!!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
No, he can't apply for a position with the USPTO, as I have a patent on The Method By Which Individuals Who Are Legal Entities May Apply For Jobs In US Government Organizations Which Are Not Based On Elections.
Obviously, I have not licensed him the procedure to apply for the job, so he can not apply without the threat of being sued. Quite naturally, I would only sue if he got hired, and then it would only be to get his job.
2^3 * 31 * 647
They didn't invent this
www.whois.sc/domain.tld
has been live for years. I'm fairly sure they wer pre August 23, 2004
they do a whois lookup based on domain.tld
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
All URLs have a search string after the server specification. In most cases it's restricted to searching for an exact match to a filename in the document root, but it is still a search.
I did this in 1999 as a part of software I wrote. I created a facility to map actions to URL strings (and yes, this includes the empty string), and one of the examples I gave was taking a freeform string and searching for it.
I am sure there are many, many, other cases where people mapped 404 to a search, which is the same thing.
In short, not only is this obvious, it is defeated by prior art.
I was doing this in 1996.
I had just joined a startup company, "Hells's Kitchen Systems", or "hks.net". We were an e-commerce startup. Our main product was CCVS, a credit-card processing system for Linux and other versions of Unix. But our first product was a shopping mall written in PHP. Not a simple store, but a mall -- it could contain multiple stores, each of which had multiple departments, each of which had a variety of products.
So, the web content was driven from database searches. But we did not want it to look like that was the case -- we wanted it to look like a family of hand-crafted web sites.
So we did exactly what's described. We appended strings to the end of URLs, and parsed the URLs and used them to search in order to build the pages. People would go through an ordering process, and an order was composed and faxed to the warehouse so it could be fulfilled. It was meant to be a cheap way to get any company that could take catalog orders onto the web without forcing them to change their business processes too much.
It was originally written in PHP/FI2, and then ported to PHP3.
Two different stores that used the system made it into production and were up for years. I am going to wrack my brian to try to remember their names, and if I can, I'll find them on the wayback machine so I can point to them. I bet a bunch of my comments made it into the delivered HTML, and so we might be able to actually prove my claim.
"URL of the form www.domain_name/search_string, where domain_name is a domain name of the web server system" Jassy, et al. needs to read the RFCs! There are nice, reserved domains for uses such as this: example.com, example.net, and example.org. This is very handy when writing documents of this type and everyone should use it. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
most inventions in history have been minor technological advancements this one applies to search engines. Today's cars are built on ~100 years of minor advancements, etc... Innovative tech companies need patents more than anybody since the true innovation are typically done by small companies and their technological advancements can be copied and pasted fairly easily. Indeed this is the reason software patents hurt the mid-large companies more than the small companies. Software patents are the only defense innovative small company has.
In a Java application server, where you build web applications using Servlets and/or JSP pages, you can configure the server so that it maps a certain URL pattern to a servlet, and anything following that URL is handed to the servlet as a parameter. This means that handling a syntax like www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels is directly supported in Java servlets, and so it sounds like the Amazon patent now limits the kind of parameters that you and I are allowed to accept in a servlet.
What's next, patenting the sine of 30 degrees? I can't see this patent holding up for one second in court.
Is there anybody here that didn't do this a decade ago?
I sure did.
Need Mercedes parts ?
The issuance of a patent only provides a presumption of validity. If Amazon decides to sue someone for running afoul of this patent, the defendant in such a case will be able to marshall all kinds of evidence that the patent was at the very least, precluded by prior art and was obvious.
Remember that issuance of a bad patent isn't the end of the world. The patent system was designed to be fault-tolerant. If Amazon wants to sue on the basis of their bad patent, they'll face difficulties in court, not to mention in the court of public opinion.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
mod_rewrite anyone?
tagged this article: obvioustothoseskilledintrade priorart
Excuse me, while I submit a patent application on "naming a URL on a web site such that it is easy for humans to remember"
Likewise, I think I will also apply for patent protection on "method for entering natural languages and/or numbers into a computer through a mechanical or electronic peripheral" with a complementary patent covering "method for laying out alphabets and numerals on strategically-placed buttons, imprints, or images" - I think I shall call such device a "keyboard" or "keypad"
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This kind of patent degrades the credibility of the Patent Office. Someone should immediately make a paid service based on this technology with an explicit taunt to Amazon challenging them to litigate in defense of this patent. If they do litigate against anyone for this patent, someone should respond by throwing a trash-can through the glass door of their corporate headquarters.
Freedom is free.
php.net has had that feature for years. Makes for a very quick way to check the manual.
e.g. http://www.php.net/sprintf
The present invention relates to user interfaces and methods for submitting search queries to web-based search engines.
I just tried the following URL's and none provided the functionality or technological advancement the patent provides to the public:
So this provides an alternative to browser toolbars that provide easy access to search engines. Who knows how long we would have went without this advancement - similar to how mankind had to wait until the 1980's before the intermittent wiper was invented and brought to market (even though the equivalents to mod_rewrite existed for decades before someone came up with that).
It is about time we all just band together and everytime the stupid USPTO puts one of these "patents" out
we will all just file a class action lawsuit against them. Make them support their stupid "approvals"...
The date that the patent is published is important too. When patents are submitted, they are private. They remain private for somewhere between 12 and 18 months. As a general rule, if other people invent the same thing you did during that time period, obviousness is proven. Of course, in this case, it sounds pretty clearly like prior art dates back to the 90s with Wikipedia. Brian
I thought maybe /. people were not reading it properly (as is the case) but I had a look at the patent and all I can say is WOW, how on earth did this get through?
But if you read it they actually invalidate their own patent.
For example they explain that normal search URLs tend to use commands like "?query=". However their patent uses "-/" to determine the rest is a search string, or can use something like "?".
So they aren't even using a non-formatted string to pass in the query.
Bring the spirit of progress to life What!?! We are always looking for talented Patent Examiners. It should say 'still looking...'. It seems to me that these positions have not been filled.
I am pretty particular about having certain Government jobs as elected positions and I fully believe this is one of them.
But let's start by electing FCC officials first, not appointing them. Too many friends giving friends jobs. Yeah, I'm looking at you George W.
~ Ron Fitzgerald
there, I've said it.
there's no place like ~
That was my first instinct too. Just the other day I heard on NPR I believe, they were talking about the length of time it takes for a patent to get through is 24 months. They also said that the each patent officer has a quota to get through and the quota has stayed the same since the offices inception even though the complexity of the patents and the amount of documentation that comes with them have increased several fold. They said that many patent examiners get caught up with their quota over their vacation. To be sure the system is broken but it's not the the workers fault. I wish I could find the source. maybe somebody else can.
TODO create witty sig.
Because applying for the patent in the first place was just fine? You could also support the Amazon boycott if throwing trash-cans isn't your thing.
MacUpdate's had this for years.
Example: http://www.macupdate.com/adobe will trigger a search for Adobe software.
AFAIK the date of the filing of the patent is not necessarily the date the invention was created. Once the patent is awarde, the prior art must be proven to have taken place before the inventor did it. If Amazon did it in 1994, then it predates all the other prior art, and since they have the patent, you guys are now screwed. IANAL
whocalled.us has done the same thing for telephone lookups.
... sooner or later their laziness will cause the whole patent system to loose whatever ounce of credibility it has left.
http://whocalled.us/lookup/2035551212
I've done it personally years ago before mod_rewrite ever existed. Every time you enter a URL you are submitting a "query" for a resource.
I want the patent office to keep granting rediculous patents
You cannot fix procedural problems by simply blaming the unfortunate person who was executing the procedure. The entire patent system is flawed - it is not a random failure, it is just an outcome of an incorrect system.
Unless it was supposed to work that way - but then why pay anyone for examining the patents before they are filed? Maybe the Patent Office should just be a kind of notary who only records when someone came up with the idea, just to give him or her the legal basis for later defending his or her rights, but does not examine whether the idea is original.
From what I can see, the patent covers urls like http://www.answers.com/search but not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search .
From the patent abstract: "the system initially determines whether the character string includes a prefix that identifies the URL as a non-search-request URL. If no such prefix is present, the character string is used in its entirely as a search string to execute a search".
I have a business method patent that states you patent an obvious technology, claim it as original, and sue the pants off anyone who uses it.
(Of course, Amazon might be able to prove that they have "prior art" on this particular patent.)
packages.debian.org/search string
causes a search through all debian packages for the search string. That seems to be closer.
Guys, guys, I know you are jumping on Amazon here, but this patent is totally valid, at least so far as the summary says:
a user wishing to search for 'San Francisco Hotels' may do by simply accessing the URL www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels
Note that Amazon has apparently found a way to access a website which has no top-level-domain! That's a great trick indeed, and truly patentable.
Let's face it, the authors of the Patent must want to seek out f[l]ame and glory by receiving patents.
One of the authors has a patent to reduce spam. Some good that's done.
It isn't possible under the standards to not force the "user" (client) to encode certain strings, but any "major" user agent will do this without human intervention. Giving an example of "mars%20rover" (not even "mars+rover" which is the better version) seems like someone is intentionally trying to mislead the less-knowledgeable, not to mention the blatant ignoring of everyone that already does URL rewriting and even those that perform additional sanitation (e.g. wikipedia converting spaces to underscores so valid URLs are clean and unescaped).
Never trust anyone over 90000.
www.domain_name/San Francisco Hotels is not even a valid URL. Special characters my arse.
Shouldn't the URL be www.domain_name/San%20Francisco%20Hotels ???
Is not %20 special characters?
These are no ordinary Joe at amazon. These are some of the bigwigs, that makes it even more shameful.
First author: Andrew Jassy, senior VP of Amazon Web service, MBA degree from Harvard B school.
Second Author: Udi Manber , Professor at University of Arizona, and chief "algorithm" officer at Amazon. Doctorate from University of Washington.
third author: Jonathan Leblang , Former VP of A9 and Alexa, current director of A2Z Development center for Amazon. Graduate of George Mason University and Virginia Tech.
Three years ago I worked on a project adding a new indexing handler to sharepoint. As the index engine builds the index it generates URL's along the lines of
www.site.com/searchterm/searchterm/etc
This URL can then be intercepted by a catch all on IIS and the parts of the URL used for searching. From this a results page was made and shown to the user. This setup exactly matches the flowchart shown and as such is a very big prior art example. This project was built and is in use by the "Performing rights society" in Europe and the US.
There is no real innovation here, its been done.
No need to dream up examples from wikipedia ... just check out the url to the patent!
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7,287,042
But if the patent examiners don't even look _that_ far... *rolleyes*...
"Good news, everyone!"
When I worked at Schlumberger, on the 'Connect Schlumberger' extranet, we used that method. It's been a staple PHP trick since at least then, if not sooner. I might have used it as early as 1995 or 1996, for a book store website I worked on.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
At least dict.die.net has been using this kind of search for years.
Try for example http://dict.die.net/prior
And this is the fact that changes everything; instead of /search/term1 term2 it's /term1 term2. Mankind is not worthy of such innovation. If any idea deserves a 20 year monopoly by virtue of novelty, non-obviousness and inventive step, it's this one. You can keep your steam engines and printing presses, this amazon patent is a bona-fide work of utter genius and we should all be grateful we have a patent system that accepts such amazing inventions.
QRZ.com has been using this technique for a very, very long time.
just type www.qrz.com/CALLSIGN and it brings up a database record associated with that ham radio callsign.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It's illegal for them to not make a profit
Path.module in Drupal is not really the same as searching for a free-form string through the website. It will not provide free-form search, but rather through the categories or whatever structure Drupal has.
.html - for automatic converting to new sites and good SEO practices. Doing a very good approximized search using Key Density search mambot in Joomla and searching article titles in a more sane way, almost feels like a Google search now (which is a feat in Joomla).
Joomla has that, in the extension: "404 Auto-Redirect Handler for Artio JoomSEF". Its from Dec. 2006 though:
http://extensions.joomla.org/component/option,com_mtree/task,viewlink/link_id,1519/Itemid,35/
Basically, it will convert any 404-page into a search (only with mod_rewrite of course).
If a good hit is found, it will show the page after a 301 redirect (as in Googles Im feeling lucky)
If not, it will show the search results for you to choose from.
I just spent the two last days improving the search using Keyword Density search mambot (Joomlas basic search really, really sucks BAD) and improving the hits from searching the article titles (excluding non-authorized pages and unpublished articles). So it is a bit weird that this comes up now, but am also pretty used to these synchronities now as Im also doing yoga and meditation.
So now, on my web page, a free form search is performed on our Joomla-installation when typing in "www.domain.com/search whatver you like-or even/with different symbols intwined/for_old_pages.php".. Just like in this patent, and maybe even a bit more advanced since it handles symbols and extra garbage like
However, the basic functionality of the 404-mambot still covers the same thing as this patent. So my improvements are just that - improvements. Logical developments. AS COMPUTING IS SUPPOSED TO BE, and not being a minefield of legal hurdles.
So this is very, very much obvious. Its just hard to find free software that implements just this exact functionality supposedly covered by the patent, but I found it in Joomla and Im sure being in a general package, it must have been used for some years in specialized websites too.
Posting anonymous since I dont want to be harassed by greedy lawyers.
Will contribute my changes when it is stable. Im sorry I cant provide contact details because of threat of law against free software development. Please call and write your legal representatives about changes to patent law.
There's actually something we can do right now to make the US patent system a little less bad. If you're an American - or someone who does business in the US or the like - write your senators and tell them to support the Patent Reform Act of 2007, S. 1145.
It's essentially a bill to make the lives of patent trolls harder. By limiting damages, making prior art defenses easier, and preventing a lot of the forum shopping we currently see, it should reduce the incentive to game the system. (The fact that its opponents are bemoaning it as "patent repeal, not patent reform" and "patent deform" is enough for me to be positively inclined towards it.) Hurting patent trolls seems esp. important given the virtual desktop patent suit that was recently filed against Red Hat and Novell.
Now, this bill isn't a panacea; it won't fix the USPTO. Will this do much to stop large companies (that actually, you know, make stuff) from filing bogus patents like this one, defensively or otherwise? I don't know. Nevertheless, it should decrease the incentives for filing gazillions of patents and the incentives for actually threatening or taking legal action. And that's a good step.
The bill passed the House and seems to have decent support in the Senate. But there's intense lobbying against it by some patent lawyers and especially the pharmaceutical industry. (Drug patents are a rather different beast than other sorts of patents. I kind of wish the law didn't treat them the same.) So we all need to write our senators to tell them we support clamping down on patent trolls and making the patent system a bit less of a minefield.
Come on, Slashdot, channel your patent-anger at Congress!
http://packages.debian.org/bob
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
The patent basically describes what quick searches (Firefox/Opera etc) are... or to be more precise: why/how they work. Eg just write the search term after "http://www.google.com/search?q=" into the address bar.
I wonder how long this madness will continue.
can anyone say mod_rewrite in apache.... I can {speaks out loud "mod_rewrite in apache" Its been done many times over and over, prior art exists already all over.
...the word PATENT has been patented....
Specific prior art to at least some of these claims would include http://bugs.debian.org/your_search_term . It does not do multiple keywords, only single ones.
Haven't Amazon said they won't use patents to stomp on little guys publically, I remember a story in O'Reilly...
The fact the USPO is **** is no longer news.
Years ago I created a website for a multi-level marketting firm. If you typed in the URL/associates name with no special coding the web server would throw an error. The error page was actually a script that would look up the associates name and generate a website selling the products and highlighting the associate. If there were no associate by that name, it took you to the parent company webpages. This was both obvious and trivial and certainly not deserving of a patent.
"... exclusive right to picking noses in an obvious way"
Yeah, but I've patented the way to do it remotely over the internet. Completely different and novel!
> "After intensive study of the proposed method in the flowchart, it appears to be an if statement."
Heh. I like how that's put.
"Upon further inspection, these are loafers."
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
A patent is supposed to contain, among other things, a list of claims, and a disclosure section. The claims contain what is protected by the patent, in disjunctive normal form - by which I mean, in order to violate the patent, you have to violate the entirety of at least one clause. After reading what's claimed, you're supposed to think, "Gee, so that's protected, but how did they achieve those results?" At that point you look at the disclosure and find out. The whole point of the patent is that the inventor is disclosing to the public what might otherwise remain a trade secret, and in exchange they are protected from imitators and competition for a certain time.
Now here's the thing: if you can read the claims, and know exactly what's going on without even looking at the disclosure, then that's a bad patent. It seems all the patents we hear about these days have that problem. In this case, it was so bad that you can figure out the process just by reading the abstract! So when I saw that, I really wanted to see what they could possibly put in the disclosure to justify this document. Unfortunately, the provided link has no disclosure! It includes one "by reference", but I cannot find "U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/792,405, filed Mar. 3, 2004" online. I'm sure it exists in the physical world, or else it would not even be technically grantable, but they don't seem to have made it available.
I'm also quite miffed that so many people here are concentrating on prior art when the obvious factor seems to outweigh it (although prior art certainly is easier to prove).
Now excuse me as I close all my firefox tabs to get back 50% of my cpu.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.