Amazon Patents Including a String at End of a URL 306
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."
Prior art? (Score:5, Informative)
eg.
http://www.php.net/stupid%20patents [php.net]
Re:Wha? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SomeStupidRandomSearchTerm [wikipedia.org]
Re:No prior art and innovative? (Score:1, Informative)
Similar has already been done (Score:4, Informative)
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 [del.icio.us]).
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.
Prior art example #5294190 (Score:5, Informative)
(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 [php.net].)
Well almost like wikipedia (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain't%20it%20true [wikipedia.org]
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?
That's mod_rewrite! (Score:5, Informative)
Just one thing to keep in mind... (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.
Re:Wha? (Score:4, Informative)
Did you test that link? It does work (after a redirect).
Patent Filed Date (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just one thing to keep in mind... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm patenting some_words.topical_search_engine_domain_name.com
I'm pretty sure I had that search-idea a few years back though. Even if it fails the prior-art test, it's pretty friggin' obvious to anybody who has ever used mod_rewrite.
My own website has two mechanisms very much like this patent and has had so for quite some time now; "file.html" requests are parsed by mod_rewrite, then send as a parameter to a PHP where the named page is loaded (and integrated in a template).
My photoalbum can take any name for a photograph, then finds the closest match to that filename, based on a number of search methods and shows it.
Atleast Amazon can't patent THOSE methods now, since I've published them
Re:Just one thing to keep in mind... (Score:3, Informative)
TFA says (as near as I can tell) that the patent was filed in Mar 2004. I'm not sure how long wikipedia has handled search strings in the URL, but it was created in 2001 [wikipedia.org]. Actually, this is a pretty common and simple thing to do. I have a website that does it. I wasn't the one who set it up, but I think it was just a 404 redirect to a script.
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:STOP POSTING NOW! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No prior art and innovative? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Prior art? (Score:1, Informative)
<a href="http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/phpweb/manual-lookup.php?revision=1.1&view=markup">manual-lookup.php from 2000</a>
manual-lookup.php is probably registered as their 404 handler.
Re:No prior art and innovative? (Score:2, Informative)
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 [uiuc.edu] 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.
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, those are page titles, not search terms... you can't just go to "http:/en/wikipedia.org/wiki/search terms", you have to go to "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=search+terms&go=Go".
There probably ARE examples of prior art, but Wikipedia isn't one of them.
I did this in 1999 (Score:3, Informative)
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 did this in 1996. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Use RFC 2606! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can you say mod_rewrite? (Score:3, Informative)
I've not read the patent fully, but if the Slashdot summary is accurate then it's utterly ridiculous.
Re:Prior art? (Score:2, Informative)
Prefix is for non-search urls. (Score:1, Informative)
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".
Re:Wha? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No prior art and innovative? (Score:1, Informative)
Couple this with an economy that treats patents as valuable assets, and it's pretty obvious where these things come from. You can't really blame the companies too much for this. It's like there was a government office that offered free money for the first person who yelled the word of the day. Wouldn't you be in their yelling?
The problem is the patent office, which allows this bullshit.