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Amazon patent decent URLs for search

A long time ago, I wrote gallery.future-i.com, and I was particularly exercised about using clean URLs (and still am).

One place I feel I did a really nice job was in making the search URLs pretty nice, e.g. a search for 'mary' lives at:

http://gallery.future-i.com/search/mary

I did that in the middle of 2001, and I expect plenty of others did similar things by then, too. For me, the tricky bit is all done by Apache's mod_rewrite, which takes incoming requests to your web site, and let's you rejig it to pass parameters to scripts without exposing all that grunge to the outside world. It isn't the only way to do it, but it is powerful and effective.

My annoyance now is that Amazon have a patent on a very similar technique, covering URLs for search results of the form http://somedomain/flibble, filed in 2004.

I was impressed by Amazon's A9 when it launched, principally for the clean URLs for search.

That doesn't mean they own the idea, which is plainly in play before that. And don't get me started on parallel invention, making it all the sillier.

I hope the patent boils away in a sea of prior art.

[Via Buzz Out Loud #589, Slashdot coverage]