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Amazon Subsidiary Alexa Patents Resubmitting Form 29

Posted by timothy from the to-do-whatnow dept.
theodp writes "Alexa Internet, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, received a patent today for their Software system and methods for resubmitting form data to related web sites. The patented process captures form data--including usernames, passwords and credit card numbers--submitted by a user to one site and resubmits it to other related web sites with or without first prompting the user. When searching a merchant's web site, related web sites may be those of merchants carrying the same or similar products. The patent also covers taking a query submitted to one Internet search engine (e.g., AltaVista) and resubmitting it to alternate search engines (e.g., Infoseek)."
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Amazon Subsidiary Alexa Patents Resubmitting Form More

Amazon Subsidiary Alexa Patents Resubmitting Form

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  • There must be hundreds of prior art examples of multiple submissions of a query to various search engines. It seems like people have been doing that since the first search engines started competing.

    I seem to remember one of my first web/cgi books using a multi-search engine results application as an example script. Unfortunately I don't recall which book at the moment, I am sure someone out there has that info.

    Regardless at face value it seems like another example of amazon & company trying to paten

    • Everyone said the same thing about the 1-click patent. Didn't change anything though. They're just patenting obvious uses of existing technology. The problem is that the PTO doesn't have the slightest freaking clue about anything related to programming.

      • Everyone said the same thing about the 1-click patent. Didn't change anything though. They're just patenting obvious uses of existing technology. The problem is that the PTO doesn't have the slightest freaking clue about anything related to programming.

        Except this one has some prior art from some pretty major players [google.com]. I doubt this will stand for very long. The bitch of it is that it will be expensive and the lawyers will (as usual) be the only ones who "benefit".

  • .NET Passport is the right answer (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @05:56PM (#5739967)
    Protest Amazon.com [amazon.com] monopoly. Sign up for Microsoft .NET Passport [passport.net] and join millions of anti-monopoly geeks out there. Software patents and giant corporations should be stopped. Read more about .NET Passport [microsoft.com] - your passport to freedom.
  • This whole patenting of doing $BLATANTLY_OBVIOUS_THING on a computer is starting to remind me of a comedian I used to enjoy. His name escapes me, but he's a cheesy ventriliquist whose crude (but cute) dummies included the Cockroach On A Stick, the Chili Pepper On A Stick, and so forth. And "on a stick" was pronounced in a sort of Cheech Marin sort of way: 'on a steeeeeck'.

    I wonder if maybe the guys over at uspto.gov are just paying homage to that guy's work?
  • Did they just patent the Man In The Middle attack?
  • Maybe theyll run gator out of town?
  • Everyone seems in an uproar about this latest Amazon patent. Why? Because they don't realize what this could mean.

    All unemployed/downsized programmers should go work at Amazon creating new patents. Think of what trivial variations you could describe! A patent for the submission of aggregate data from two forms, or one for the process of submitting form data to two websites and sticking the results in frames!

    There's money to be made in those patent hills, and you don't even need to invent anything to

  • BIG security flaw (Score:2, Informative)

    by David_Bloom ( 578245 )
    This is a stupid idea to begin with (I don't mind when things like this are patented.)

    You are already putting yourself at risk by submitting form data (usernames, passwords, et cetera) to a site. There is a slight chance the site will be hacked. Now imagine that you are visiting thousands of sites, with Alexa automatically throwing in your username/password/CC number without regard for the possibility of the site being hacked. I know that there is an option for notifying the user, but most people are lazy/

    • I know that there is an option for notifying the user, but most people are lazy/ignorant and will turn the notification off.

      There's only that option because they decide to allow it. They could change that at any time - it's not a technological requirement.

      Although, that'd be a good one-off patent. I'll patent the way of performing this POST redirection where the user is not notified. Thus everyone who wants to use this technology has to not notify the user, thus they can't do it in a user-honoring man

  • WorldPay [worldpay.com] uses a similar patent where a user who has paid with his/her credit card and on any site associated with WorldPay they simply fill in their user name and password and the system automatically retrieves credit card number, address, etc. Since they are using this patent for years now, how can a patent holder who has registered it as patent at a later date, start charging them?

    • Since they are using this patent for years now, how can a patent holder who has registered it as patent at a later date, start charging them?

      If they're using prior art, it should be a perfect defense, but through stupidity of courts and the patent office, they may lose anyway...

  • resumbit to alternate search engines (Score:3, Informative)

    by coaxial ( 28297 ) on Tuesday April 15, 2003 @08:16PM (#5740799) Homepage
    If I'm remembering correctly, HotBot [hotbot.com] provided a single interface to search yahoo, altavista, lycos, and excite simultaneously back in the day. "Back in the Day" being 1994-1996. I do know that submit-it.com [submit-it.com] provided a single interface to submitting URLs to multiple indexes/search_engines/portals as far back as 1995. I know this because at the time I knew
    Scott Banister [scottbanister.com] founder of submit-it.com. (My reaction at the time was, "Big freaking deal. It's just a perl script and copy-and-pasted HTML.")
  • I would like to take this time to announce my newest patent on any software program that outputs the words "Hello World" or any variation including but now limited to the words "hello" and "world". If you see a violation of this patent, please contact me at patent_nazi@amaz0n.com
  • Yes, I know, RMS already wrote the code, but I am now the holder of the patent on EMACS, a full featured text editing program with a fully-functional LISP facility and a kitchen sink on the side.
    • Yes, I know, RMS already wrote the code, but I am now the holder of the patent on EMACS, a full featured text editing program with a fully-functional LISP facility and a kitchen sink on the side.

      You know, I think there are a lot of people who think you would be doing the world a favor by never licensing that patent...

  • Since I havn't read the article I may not understand this one but in the fine slashdot tradition I'll post anyway.

    The first part, passing cached information from site to sight sounds kind of pernicious so perhaps a patent isn't a bad thing - the idea won't spread as fast.

    The second part was used by dogpile and some other meta search engines since quite a while back... wouldn't that be the equivelent of the pipe "|"?

    locate blah |grep .rpm

    Maybe patent inspector should be a bit better paid job. "would you
  • The technique is specifically documented in the O'Reilly book on module programming for apache, and used in
    various reverse proxy type engines.

  • Reading the article... (Score:2, Informative)

    by signer ( 599834 )
    ...I find two points that seem to need clarification. First, the patent is solely concerned with forms where the person using the web browser (must be a web browser interface, command line usage of "|" doesn't apply) is given a separate opportunity to ask for the data to be submitted to different search engines/stores. Dogpile might count as prior art, since if you get a lot of responses you may be asked whether you want your search query submitted to more engines, but might not, since neither the search
  • If this patent holds out, it'll make all of those spam sites that add you to other spam lists in violation of patent laws!
  • Alexa is now selling space in their "related links" pages. Normally the related links are based on DMOZ or category listings. However, if you have enough money, you can buy a listing on your competitor's sites.

    For example, when you visit ZoneEdit [zoneedit.com], a self-funded, but popular [alexa.com] website, you get a link to UltraDNS - a well-funded, but less popular [alexa.com] company.

    Allowing advertising on competitor's sites is more than unfair, it's evil. Why would decent-seeming companies like Google and Amazon would associate thems

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