Encouraging consumer reviews has become a popular means to create a magnet to a site by garnering freely provided content. Customizing/categorizing/pruning search results has become an obvious necessity to anyone who's used any Internet search engine, where searching has become a formula for generating info-weeds - finding the info-flower you were looking for is increasingly difficult with so many spurious results. Amazon has but a few of the numerous patents in these areas.

Web personalization is another area that is heavily patented; 6,606,102 is exemplary. Personalized news is still nascent, with MSNBC Newsbot and Google News leading the way. With the Web's mind-boggling level of content, personalized news seems inevitable, especially considering that newshounds are willing to cut through some of the clutter by yielding some information about their personal interests. The infrastructure for personalized news is well established - news stories come to web publishers pre-filtered with metadata that allows a story to be categorized and keywords easily searched. Moreover Technologies is one company that provides such news metadata tagging; check out their free RSS categorized newsfeed service. The only missing ingredient to personalization is simply keeping track of what a consumer clicks on to read or searches for.

While the patented solutions to these aspects of the Internet may seem obvious now, consider that all the above patents were filed five and six years ago. At that time, devising these solutions took foresight.

Basic Internet patents were filed in 1993-1995, with a second wave of technological advancement to 1998. This prior art searcher has been impressed at the level of patenting corresponding to now-common web site features.

More advanced e-commerce patents filed within the past few years give a glimpse of what the Internet is becoming. The sophistication of e-commerce, particularly with regard to marketing techniques and application of economics, has hardly begun.

A very few Internet patents have made litigation headlines so far, Amazon v. Barnes & Noble over Amazon's one-click shopping checkout being the most notorious, but it's only a matter of time before the trickle of Internet-related patent suits becomes a flood. When that happens, the outcry for "patent reform" is going to be deafening.

Here's some of the stir over the freshly minted Amazon patents: Internet News, Red Herring, The Register,  peter zura's two-seventy-one patent blog.