The string in the title should search for the phrase “weird patent” in the a9.com search engine. Apparently, the Amazon subsidiary was awarded this patent. To be more precise, no one else can now support inclusion of unformatted search string after domain name portion of URL, without permission from Amazon.
Maybe the software development team did really cool things to get this working, but I cannot help but wonder about value of this patent. I am not very good at reading the verbose language in the patents, so I do not know if this is about the URL design or the search that is done or both. Also, how is it determined whether a search is done or not. For example, this blog displays information about it when you visit http://ifacethoughts.net/about URL. I am sure Wikipedia uses a similar URL design to display the pages. If I search for abstraction in Wikipedia, I am directly taken to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction. Is there a search involved? Will this violate the patent?
The comments over Slashdot give more examples where this might be already used. I think it is fair if we ask to exempt the sites who have implemented this idea before the patent was awarded. They did not have the knowledge if this technique was patented or not.
And I hope more patents do not follow who hijack the pretty and search friendly URL designs. Soon the rest of us will have to go back to using the long query strings, that is until they get patented.
October 24th, 2007 at 9:54 am
> I think it is fair if we ask to exempt the sites who have implemented this idea before the patent was awarded.
If there is any sites that used this method before the patent(of course there are), the patent will be nullified - its called prior art.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:36 am
I thought prior art applied to those who implemented it before the patent was applied for. I am wondering about those who have implemented after the patent was applied for and before it was granted.
October 25th, 2007 at 7:25 am
A patent cannot be granted, if there is prior art for it.
At any rate, this is hardly a “state of the art” — the patent should not have been granted.