Assigning textual ads based on article history Options

[bragadocchio]

There's something to this new patent application from Microsoft that reminds me of the movie Minority Report, where the protagonist goes through a shopping area, and his past purchases inform the billboards and advertisements of his potential future interests.

Assigning textual ads based on article history


The abstract from the application:

A method of selecting textual advertisements for display on a web page based on user history. In the method, a user accessing a web site is identified. Keywords in articles displayed on web pages viewed by the user are identified and stored in a user profile. The advertisements displayed on a current user selected web page are based on keywords from the articles viewed by the user in the past that are stored in the user profile.

Collecting keywords from pages that you've visited in the past, to decide what ads to show you now? It's an attempt, somewhat, to get away from contextual based ads that may not be appropriate, as described in the application:

One problem with these prior advertising techniques is that advertisements could be assigned to potentially embarrassing articles. For example, a search that returns a story about an airline crash could also return an advertisement for the airline involved in the crash.

The descriptions of which different factors might be considered when choosing ads to show is interesting.

[kensplace]

Sites like amazon, and ebay already do similar things.

Ebay collects data relating to what searches you do, what items you look at etc, and recommends related products, it even suggests things it thinks you may like, based on your past history.

I find it worrying that microsoft, and the like, are basically patenting things that are not really inventions, just ways of doing something. They patent business practices, code, etc and I dont know about the usa, but at least in the UK (as far as I know) patents are supposed to be granted only if the idea is "not obvious" to an expert in the field.

Things like basing advertising on the visitors demographics are standard marketing, keeping track of what they were interested in previously is common place, weighting keywords is common, aging them often happens naturally if they are sorted by date.
The one thing that I had not thought of, or come across before, was the different language idea, but its not something I would probably want to use, as there is no guarentee the visitor didnt click in error, and I would not want to keep serving up ads they cant read. Much better to just ask them what languages they speak in their profile.

So many of these patents are the type of thing that people would come up with naturally if they needed to write the same application, and many of the patents are obvious to people in the field, so how they get them granted is beyond me....

Give it a few years, and the only people who will be able to write any software will be the giants who have patented every single possible thing that can be written....

I often wonder how many of these patents are just Microsoft trying to stop open source software, or other competitors and startups from operating.