8 ms·
The USPTO databases have to be one of the most torturous services to their users in the whole of internet. The UI of both the patent and trademark search is arc
by vesinisa 10y ago
The USPTO databases have to be one of the most torturous services to their users in the whole of internet. The UI of both the patent and trademark search is archaic, but not in a HN way but in a really bad way.
In patent search, there is no "search" box. Instead, the "quick search" forces you to specify two (and exactly two) text queries on the database columns with obligatory boolean operation.[1] Even if you happen to find an interesting patent, good luck linking to it (which should be the number one service they provide - GET individual patent documents). The page showing the patent document has a dozen cryptic query parameters in the URL, some of which relate to the search query you used to find the patent! No "make shareable link" button to be seen, either.
And don't get me started on the trademark search, or Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS), as they like to call it.[2] When you navigate to the front page, you get a private session identifier - in your URL of course! And when you search for a trademark ("simple search" is intuitively known as "New User" here) and select a TM to view, you would be excused of thinking that the short URL in your browser address bar is the linkable URL of this entry. But no - it's just your session identifier along with the document's index in the results of your last search query.
When you leave the trademark site or just click "Logout" (since you're a kind person - they after all ask you "logout when you are done to release system resources allocated for you"), that URL is gone in the wind. If you shared a link to that trademark to your friend, they only get this very helpful page:
<H1>This search session has expired. Please start a search session again by clicking on the TRADEMARK icon, if you wish to continue</H1>
So no way to link to individual TM registrations here either.
1: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html
2: http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/
- ronsor 10y agoIf you look at the url, you notice they are using CGI and Win32 EXEs
- TheDong 10y agoYou can't know that. It could have been redeveloped in anything, but kept the original url scheme for backwards compatibility.
- anticedent 10y agoOh, come now. Whether he can or cannot know such a thing is however many angels, dancing on the head of a pin. Do you honestly believe anything this terrible went through a rewrite? I sure don't.
- dbenhur 10y agoI know! I takes at least three rewrites to make it that terrible.
- shakethemonkey 10y agoThe URLs in question have no backwards compatibility, by design.
- tinlicker 10y agoSee also the HTTP shopping cart: http://ebiz1.uspto.gov/vision-service/ShoppingCart_P/ShowShoppingCart http://ebiz1.uspto.gov/vision-service/ShoppingCart_P/ShowSho... Probably the only thing keeping this from being abused is that it's the government, it's a low-value target, and they're paying millions upon millions for someone to support this trainwreck with security patches.
- vesinisa 10y agoOf course - obscure as it gets, session state based navigation and top of it off with username/password form over unencrypted HTTP.
- lend000 10y agoThank goodness for Google patents and patents.justia.com (which is HTTP, by the way). Regardless, much more usable than the Patent Office website.
- rhino369 10y agoGoogle Patent is a lifesaver for me. But I've noticed increasing number of errors.
- jhwhite 10y agoFor patents what about: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/search https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html#/patent/searc...
- fiatjaf 10y agoThe bizarre practice of assigning session keys to visitors and somehow storing the page they're viewing in the server instead of in the URL is pretty common in Brazilian government, which is dominated by Java programmers.
- progval 10y agoA Java app of my university does this too. Is this a practice shared by most Java programmers? How come?
- meddlepal 10y agoNot in modern Java... or any I've seen in the last several years. There's a lot of fucked up legacy code and frameworks out there though.
- pavement 10y agoThis practice has nothing to do with Java, at all. It is not an approach that was invented by Java, for Java, and it is not in any way unique to Java. Most web technologies support rendering a view based on a set of values residing in a database, and use the values to populate a template. The template contains placeholders reserved for values expected to originate from a database. The version of the page that appears in your web browser usually does not exist as a serialized HTML page on a disk connected to a server. It often only exists as a representation of two pieces of information bound to a session in memory on a server: 1. The Template or server-side script, 2. the values you are authorized to retrieve from the database, which may or may not be a SQL database. What you see in the address bar does not need to correlate to the HTML rendered in the browser window. JavaScript (which is not Java) often employs this technique, termed as a "single page web application." This is true for PHP, Mcrosoft, Ruby, Python, Perl, server-side JavaScript (such as node.js) and yes Java too.
- jsolson 10y agoWhat's being described above isn't simply template-based rendering (which, yes, essentially everything does), but the practice of building web-software like desktop software and keeping the state of the UI server-side. It ignores that browsers are capable of effectively forking the UI through (today) tabs and (historically) "Open in New Window". Interacting with such software is a profoundly unpleasant experience; thankfully it's not particularly common, especially outside of "enterprise" applications (including government services, public utilities, education management, property management, healthcare, etc.) It is not Java-specific, but it is common to a few specific Java frameworks as well as at least one of Microsoft's older frameworks (I forget which one). The vast majority of frameworks (including most modern Java frameworks) do the sane thing and keep application state on the server side (often in a database, as you describe) and UI state on the browser side, which allows links and forms to work the way links are generally supposed to work.
- gondo 10y agothey actually recommend google on their search page! [1] "You can also try this same search on Google." [1] https://www.uspto.gov/blog/ebiz/search?q= https://www.uspto.gov/blog/ebiz/search?q=
- tgjsrkghruksd 10y agoThat's for searching the USPTO website. Not searching patents, or Google's patent search.
- Twirrim 10y agoFWIW, you're often better off not searching, or looking at, patents. If you end up in a patent case, your liabilities will be much higher if they can sufficiently claim you knowingly infringed. Evidence that you searched for patents can weigh against you / your employer. Even if you weren't associated with the infringing product itself.
- skummetmaelk 10y agoAnother hilarity of the patent system.
- nullc 10y agoThis is largely outmoded advice in the wake of in re seagate. Simply having looked at a patent is not enough to create willful infringement.
- nullc 10y agoI've just been informed that in re seagate got over turned last year. Bad news.
- monochromatic 10y agoDid it? Got a link?
- WCityMike 10y agoJust Google "In Re Seagate Overturned".
- monochromatic 10y agoAlso, once you get your patent search results, clicking on one of the links takes an amount of time that seems to scale with the complexity of the search. So I suspect that they actually re-run the search every time you request a result.
- i336_ 10y agoWow. Question: if it's really this bad, this site is going to have incredibly poor ratelimiting or per-IP analytics/access controls, if it has these things at all. So, it probably wouldn't be too impossible for someone to build a new site (maybe even an API) that talks to this and prettifies the results, lets you copy URLs (most likely via caching¹), and so forth. (The case in point about my previous paragraph is that the new site would generally hitting the old one, possibly several times a second, from one IP.) You'd just need a strong mind to handle the inanities of talking to this system. :P ¹ But with the caching thing, you'd absolutely have to have a disclaimer stating that the services don't replace the USPTO website, yada yada (along with some wording buried in a policy document that carefully points out that the data is cached). I mean you'd need that anyway, but yeah.
- knodi123 10y ago> to release system resources allocated for you Jesus christ.
- flukus 10y agoHas anyone built an open index, legal or otherwise? Doesn't seem like it would be too hard to script the downloads and build a real search tool for it.