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Amazon Patents Including a String at End of a URL

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the why-didn't-i-think-of-that-oh-wait dept.

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."

12 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Prior art? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:Wha? by KevMar · · Score: 5, Informative

    yep, I have never ever seen this one before.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomeStupidRandomSearchTerm

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  3. Similar has already been done by MyDixieWrecked · · Score: 3, Informative

    Similar implementations have already been done.

    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 /search/blah...

    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 /invoice/# or invoice/customer/[name or number] or search for customers using similar techniques.

    The trick involves a .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.

    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.

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  4. Prior art example #5294190 by matlhDam · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  5. Well almost like wikipedia by marcello_dl · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

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  6. That's mod_rewrite! by Sandb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  7. Just one thing to keep in mind... by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:Just one thing to keep in mind... by Known+Nutter · · Score: 3, Informative

      According to the patent text, the filing date was March 2004. Wikipedia (and many other sites) have certainly been using this method for years prior to that.

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  8. Re:Wha? by Bob-taro · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah except that isn't what they patented. If wikipedia worked with http://en.wikipedia.org/Priorart then that would be an example of prior art.

    Did you test that link? It does work (after a redirect).

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  9. Patent Filed Date by Loether · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

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  10. Re:No prior art and innovative? by Snowhare · · Score: 3, Informative

    Right. So innovative that I only put a CPAN Perl module (CGI::PathInfo) up for that kind of crap, oh, SEVEN YEARS ago.

  11. Use RFC 2606! by EnvyRAM · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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