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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
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
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
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...
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.
Hmmm... with your thinking process that goes: "I've never seen this. It's probably patentable!", you could have a good future working at the USPTO. Have you thought about applying for a position there?
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
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.
Not early enough. I have prior art in 2003... because my boss wanted exactly this sort of behavior. ISAPI extensions in C++. This was one of my first bits of web development - and if it was obvious to me then... well... I'd hardly call it novel. He did not want to type a ? or add in any search=... parameters. Just parse the url and use whatever text was there as the search string.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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!
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
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
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.
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
Right. So innovative that I only put a CPAN Perl module (CGI::PathInfo) up for that kind of crap, oh, SEVEN YEARS ago.
It's called PATH_INFO. I've been using it since 1996 to implement hierarchical indexes and implied searches for internal websites where I've worked. Most people have never heard of it, because they haven't read the CGI spec, they've just cargo-culted something from the examples directory or, worse, copied a CGI from someone who didn't understand CGI, either.
The structure of a CGI URL in NCSA HTTPD and Apache is:
(#anchors aren't passed to the server, they're used in the browser only.)
So, you can use /path_info if you like, instead of ?query=string. It makes it nicer if you can represent something hierarchically, like .../toolindex/autoconf/2.53/ gives you the meta-info page on how and why autoconf 2.53 got on to our servers. But .../toolindex/autoconf/ just tells you what versions are there.
Combine with ScriptAlias / or SetHandler, and you can do it from the root of the server.
It's a little more work if you want to allow some known paths to go to regular static pages and not the CGI-or-equivalent.
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
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
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
there, I've said it.
there's no place like ~
MacUpdate's had this for years.
Example: http://www.macupdate.com/adobe will trigger a search for Adobe software.
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.