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Amazon owns all your URL's (and the US patent office is full with idiots)

Amazon (apart from having cool services such as EC2 and S3) is known for it's infamous patents. And the patent office in the US known for having idiots as employees. A great combination! After their "one click shopping" patent, now A9 (amazons's search engine) claims their fame by patenting a String at End of a URL. Prior what? Something Drupal does -in combination with some mod rewrite voodoo- for ages.

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.'

And it is new according to Amazon, because:

Description of the Related Art
...
Some search engine sites support the ability for a user to submit a search query by encoding the search string within a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Typically, however, the user must encode the search string in the URL using special formatting that is inconvenient or unnatural for users to type. For example, in some cases, users must add a special string such as "query=" to indicate that a search is being requested, and/or must add special characters to the search string itself. As one example, the URL www.google.com/search?q=mars%20rover may be used to the search for "mars rover."

Now it is clear that Amazon doesn't get a way with this and the moment they would sue a Drupal site that can do this like Drupal.org the complete blogosphere and OSS community would be against Amazon making them the paria that SCO has become. Yet, there will be a time -I think within the next 20 month or so- that Drupal.org, Dries, the hosting party or the Drupal Association will get sued over a patent. That's why we -not just Drupal but the complete Open Source community- have to get organized and be prepared for such a slaughter. That's why there is work under way from Dries and the Association to be prepared. And you can help the association. By donating time or money. Please do!

By bertboerland at 23/10/2007 - 18:59 | drupal | english | internet culture | money | Sad | search-engines | weird | bertboerland's blog | 922 reads

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Nope

The way I understand it, there is not patent infringement with the way Drupal uses URLs.

What they patented seems to be this:
mydomain.com/search/vogon poetry hitchhicker galaxy
no visible query stuff and several terms separated by spaces

instead of the more usual
mydomain.com/search?terms=vogon+poetry+hutchhicker+galaxy
or the drupal clean URLs way
mydomain.com/search/vogon+poetry+hutchhicker+galaxy

In fact it's closer to Firefox keywords, which enable you for example to search Google by typing, "goog vogon poetry hitchhicker galaxy", if "goog" is your triggering keyword.

Also, I've heard their request to patent "one click shopping" has finally been refused recently.

By elv (not verified) at Tue, 23/10/2007 - 11:17pm | reply

Correction

I had a closer look at the flowchart, it seems their idea is:
- take whatever is behind the first slash after the domain name
- if it begins with some kind of reserved keyword followed by a slash, it's a regular URL.
- it it's something else, it's a search.

Regular URLs:
amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=gw_br_bo/104-1088132
amazon.com/software-business-education/b/ref=gw_br_sw/104-1088132-05
amazon.com/anyKeyword/somethingElse/whatever

Search URLs:
amazon.com/harry potter
amazon.com/nintendo wii mario kart
amazon.com/one or more words

By elv (not verified) at Tue, 23/10/2007 - 11:31pm | reply

I believe the USPTO recently

I believe the USPTO recently revoked almost all of the patents relating to the one-click shopping based on a patent re-examination application filed by an individual in New Zealand that showed tons of prior art.

I guess this one is headed the same way.

By venkat-rk (not verified) at Wed, 24/10/2007 - 5:24am | reply

Firefox will do the special

Firefox will do the special formatting for you, so you could enter

http://drupal.org/search/node/amazon sucks

And in Drupal it's easy to map "search/node" to "amazon%20sucks". So you could even enter

http://drupal.org/amazon sucks/amazon sucks

to check whether Amazon sucks! ;-)

By kritsch-AVRO-lid (not verified) at Wed, 24/10/2007 - 10:21am | reply

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