Wow this truly floored me. The US Patent Office (USPTO) has granted a patent for placing a "search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.". See the diagram left that helped them seal the deal with the USPTO.A popular technique known as URL aliasing and URL rewriting evolved which allowed developers to move away from non friendly URL's like this:
http://www.domain.com/index.aspx?id=63304&mode=wide
To friendly URL's like this:
http://www.domain.com/vacation packages wisconsin
URL Aliasing been around for many years, and was popularized by Google's search engine. Using this URL format is beneficial in two ways, it's ultra search engine friendly give the pages ranking a boost, and its more user friendly.
On doing some research on this the subject the USPTO is meant to granted patents for something that aren't obvious. Also unless you can prove you were using this technology prior to Amazon filing this patent in 2004 you could be in trouble. This is pure madness! It would seem that this technique utilized by hundreds of millions of data driven websites and blogs are now in breach of Amazon's patent?
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