AN OVERBROAD PATENT ON CUSTOMIZING A WEBSITE - This issued patent seeks to patent the idea of... building a user profile by watching user behavior on a website! 10 minutes of your time can help narrow US patent applications before they become patents. Follow @askpatents on Twitter to help.
Patent: U.S. Patent No. 6,330,592
Question: Have you seen anything published before Dec. 5, 1998 that discusses:
- Tracking visitor interests according to what content they access
- Categorizing dynamically-generated content according to categories of interests
- Caching dynamically-generated content and serving cached versions to subsequent users who exhibit those interests.
If so, please submit evidence of prior art as an answer to this question. We welcome multiple answers from the same individual.
Claim 1
Claim 1 is representative and claims "A method of customizing a web site, said method comprising":
labeling content of the web site;
when at least one visitor accesses the content of a web site, registering the labeled accessed content in a personalized data file;
storing the data file for the at least one visitor;
generating at least one pre-customized display for a first visitor;
caching the at least one pre-customized displays on the server computer;
displaying the at least one pre-customized display to the first visitor;
analyzing the data file of a second visitor and associating the second visitor with the at least one pre-customized display, wherein analyzing is performed after generating; and
displaying the at least one pre-customized display to the second visitor, wherein the at least one pre-customized display is not regenerated before displaying the at least one pre-customized display to the second visitor."
SPECIAL NOTE: "Pre-customized display" means pre-associated with some category or other means of tracking visitor interests. The rest is all fairly close to plain English.
Claim 11
Claim 11 is probably the broadest; and so the easiest to find prior art for. It claims "A computer readable memory that can direct a web site server computer to function in a specified manner, comprising":
visitor files stored in said computer memory of said web site server computer;
pre-customized web content items stored in said computer memory of said web site server computer; and
executable instructions stored in said computer memory of said web site server computer, said executable instructions including
a. instructions to access an existing visitor file for a visitor;
b. instructions to review data in existing visitor file to determine visitor preferences; and
c. instructions, based on said visitor preferences, to provide pre-customized files to visitor."
SPECIAL NOTE Term that need clarification:
- visitor file: A file on the server that tracks visitor preferences and interests.
- web content item: The spec has defined this very broadly, encompassing "Any item that can be accessed and viewed by a visitor, such as an entire web page, a component of a web page, an insertion into a web page or a graphic link. Web Content Items can be defined through a markup language, including, but not limited to, HTML."
- pre-customized: means the same thing it did in Claim 1.
Ideally, prior art will embody each of the limitations (list items) for one of the claims above.
What is good prior art? Please see our FAQ.
Want to help? Please vote or comment on submissions below. We welcome you to post your own request for prior art on other questionable US Patent Applications.