Greetings. Man, those amusing guys at the USPTO are still busily approving inane technology patents. It may be tougher these days to patent perpetual motion machines (you have to provide a working model now, apparently) but when it comes to the Internet the sky's the limit!

Amazon has just been granted a patent for placing a search string after the domain part of a URL. Say what?

It seems that the supposedly "unique" part of this "invention" is the concept of having the search string follow the specified host domain without any prefix characters. So, instead of searching for foo with:

https://www.vortex.com/search?s=foo

or something similar, the Amazon patent appears to cover the case of:

https://www.vortex.com/foo

where foo in this example, presumably not matching any direct path on the site, is taken as a search string since it does not start with a predefined character prefix sequence, which if present would indicate a non-search string.

Wow! Do the patent examiners really read those applications any more, or are patents being granted based on the Captain Peter Peachfuzz "dartboard" weather forecasting technique?

--Lauren--