Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Amazon Patents Customized 404 Pages

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the makes-my-heart-hurt dept.

theodp writes "Among the patents awarded to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Tuesday was one for his invention of Error Processing Methods for Providing Responsive Content to a User When a Page Load Error Occurs, which covers displaying alternate web pages in response to HTTP 404 page-not-found errors. So is this the technology that causes Amazon's Home Page to be displayed when Bezos' MIA Patent Reform Page can't be found?"

6 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. How stupid can the patent office be.. by bleh-of-the-huns · · Score: 3, Informative

    I mean seriously, in the last 2 weeks, we have the Minerva Industries patent on smartphones, and now this.. Who the hell is working in the patent office.....

    I am sure we can find some prior art.. the most annoying being angelfire and geocities from way back when.

    --
    I came, I conquered, I coredumped
  2. Not prior art by codegen · · Score: 5, Informative

    The patent is not about the server serving custom
    error pages (which is your post), but about a client
    side process that communicates with a separate error server
    to generate the appropriate response. So I would guess it
    is a intended to be a plugin for a browser.

    But then this is slashdot, why bother to read the article.

    --
    Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
  3. It's *CLIENT* based by ps236 · · Score: 5, Informative

    If anyone else has read the patent, they'll realise that it's a CLIENT-SIDE component that's involved.

    Most (all?) 'automatic redirect' systems I've seen are server based - the server runs a script which says 'That page couldn't be found, did you mean any of these...'

    I can't imagine who'd put this on the client with client-server communication going on. It sounds like a vastly over-engineered and 'Enterprisey' solution to me. It DOES have the advantage that it can look back in the browser history, but I'm not sure I see how that could benefit the user (the component COULD tell the server what's in the history though, so it could benefit Amazon!)

  4. Re:The Plan by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 4, Informative

    And by the way, what constitutes "customized" when its open source software?

    Their patent doesn't have anything to do with 404 pages. Their patent covers the specific case of having multiple error pages corresponding to cashed version, or closest name for a page, etcetera -and- a client side component that says failures load alternate version X. The client-side component may be prt of the browser. But the important thing is that the error type is user-settable./p

    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!
  5. Re:The Plan by ashridah · · Score: 3, Informative

    closest name for a page
    So... mod_speling for apache would be an accurate representation of prior art of some of that patent, then...

    ash

  6. Re:The Plan by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2, Informative

    So... mod_speling for apache would be an accurate representation of prior art of some of that patent, then...

    Nope. Or rather, only if the user got to choose whether the server would use mod_speling -or- an alternate method. The patent is about letting the client choose one of N (N >= 2) methods of error handing, like mod_speling. It doesn't appear to cover any specific method of error handling.

    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!