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."

Comments

Re:Focused on Search Engines

[nwssa]

Um, like php.net/isset?

This is not "web search engine".

I have read it, it's still stupid - yes it has uses, but it's certainly not a technological advancement. It's something that's been around since mod_rewrite as a codified structure & available earlier than that as customized 404 pages. Slapping 'for search engines' on it doesn't make it innovative. It makes it a waste of everyones time.

Looking at history of civilization and how technology evolves - it is filled with examples of minor innovations. Add up all those minor innovations over years and you've got some big progress (look at cars the past ~100 years). Many of those minor innovations would not happen without some financial investments. Many of those investments would not happen without some guarantee for the investor. A patent is one way to get a guarantee (trade secrets, copyrights, etc... are others). Software is no different from any other technology except that software developers want to disregard the blood sweat and tears expended to bring the current state of technology to market.

So please do go on to explain how exactly applying existing webserver controls to the subset of webservers dedicated to search engines is innovative & non-obvious.

1. Everything simple is obvious in hindsight.

It's similar to whether we would have intermittent windshield washers on our cars today if that guy back in the late 70's didn't invent it. Keep in mind that:

• the problem (variable rain volume),
• the technology for intermittent windshield washers

all existed for decades before ~1980. Once people saw an implementation of intermittent wipers it was dead obvious (timer delay switch and pause at the end of the cycle), but obviously back before 1970's people didn't think it was a problem worth solving or it wasn't obvious (I would think the former). So obviousness of the invention/innovation is not everything but it could be the problem isn't seen as a problem or not seen as the problem.

2. One Useful example

Maybe some people don't have the Google item in their browser toolbar and/or it would be easier to type "google.com/search term". Say I am at a locked down computer (library, internet cafe, parents house, etc...) and their browser is some older version that does not have Google in their toolbar (say IE 5), so instead of 1) going to google.com, 2) typing "search term", instead with this innovation I can just: 1) enter "google.com/search term" into the URL bar. So 1 less step.
Alternatively, this saves someone from remembering and typing: google.com/search?q=search%20term

3. Prior Art

I still haven't seen any prior art for web search engines that provide this functionality. Again none of these work:

• www.google.com/slashdot
• www.yahoo.com/slashdot
• www.altavista.com/slashdot
• search.msn.com/slashdot

4. How do you *know* someone else would have came up with this?

If this is so obvious why didn't the other major search engines provide this functionality? How can you guarantee that 1) the search engines would have come up with this, 2) provided it.