Data processing: vehicles – navigation – and relative location – Navigation – Employing position determining equipment
Reexamination Certificate
1999-08-20
2002-10-22
Eng, David Y. (Department: 2155)
Data processing: vehicles, navigation, and relative location
Navigation
Employing position determining equipment
Reexamination Certificate
active
06470269
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to publishing hypermedia documents over wide area networks such as the World Wide Web. More particularly, this invention relates to the application of the price discrimination technique in the area of economics to the publishing of hypermedia documents containing advertising materials.
B. Description of the Related Art
Wide area networks (WANs), notably the Internet, are assuming the role of “information superhighways” and are distributing electronic embodiments of mail, textbooks, magazines, advertisements, and even audio and video clips around the world. Herein the term “document” generically denotes and includes any and all such electronic content.
FIG. 1
conceptually illustrates the basic architecture of a “client-server” WAN, like the Internet. Servers
10
a-n
form the backbone of the WAN. The servers are interconnected by a telecommunications infrastructure and exchange information in the form of one or more recognized protocols, such as protocol
30
. For example, in the case of the Internet, network protocols include the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), for file transfer, and Telnet, for remote log-in. Each server effectively represents and services its one or more “clients”. Basically, the clients are the ultimate sources and targets of underlying information, while the servers dispatch and receive messages across the WAN in compliance with network protocols. Each client may correspond to a single user's computer, or may itself be hierarchically complex and may comprise a further sub-network or collection of numerous computers, such as the well-known, proprietary sub-networks of America Online, Compuserve, and Prodigy. In this way, information of any kind can be distributed worldwide in electronic form at high speeds.
One of the most rapidly expanding aspects of the Internet is the World Wide Web (the Web). The Web is comprised of those Internet servers (and their clients) able to support the Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol, better known as the “http”. The Web allows documents and graphical materials to be interlinked by means of “hypertext” (or more generally, hypermedia) document elements. When a user utilizes a cursor control device to select and “click” on a hypermedia item in one document, a related document will automatically be accessed as identified by that link. For example,
FIG. 2
illustrates a simple example of a popular Web document known as a “home page”. The home page is the main page of a Web site. A Web site is comprised of several Web pages. For example, the Web pages
602
,
604
,
606
, and
608
in
FIGS. 6
a-d
are the pages that form the Web site. The main page
602
is the home page of the Web site. In
FIG. 2
, another example of a home page
40
includes title
42
, graphic image
44
, instructional text
48
, and list of bullet items
46
a-c
. Selections
46
a-c
are each hypertext. A Web hypermedia item is actually encoded with a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) tag, which literally addresses a document located on a remote network server. If a client of a Web server is equipped with suitable “browser” software, then a user of that client can point and click on any one of the hypermedia items within home page
40
, and an http request to view the associated, linked content residing elsewhere on the Internet will automatically be generated and dispatched by the client's server to the appropriate Internet server which “hosts” the linked document. The linked material will then automatically be retrieved and ultimately displayed on the client. Http further includes the Hyper-text markup language (html), which may be used to specify a certain layout structure for Web documents, e.g., specifying subsections of the document as a title, image, list, etc. Html specifications are interpreted by a client's browser, resulting in an appropriate display on the particular client's computer platform.
FIG. 3
provides a broad outline of a prior art client-server architecture, for use in the context of a WAN such as that illustrated in FIG.
1
. User's client machine
20
d
preferably includes digital computer facilities including CPU
68
, user I/O peripherals
66
, and storage device
64
(including internal and external memory) for storing operating system
62
and client software
60
. WAN server
10
d
, preferably coupled to client
20
d
through a high-speed local connection, is equipped with digital computer facilities analogous to those of client
20
d
, and also with server software
50
. The server
10
d
constitutes what is known in the art as a service provider.
A user can access a search engine's web site by using the browser software. A search engine is a service that compiles a list of target documents (Web pages, but not necessarily a home page), in the form of hypertext links, that correspond to an user query. These search engines have recently turned into portals. A portal is an Internet Web site that not only offers the user the capability to perform a search, but that attempts to satisfy all of the needs of the user by integrating other services into their site.
FIG. 4
a
shows an example of a portal site displaying the search results for a query of “cheap airfare”. Portals are in fact second generation services, and are essentially a refinement of Web search engine services.
One of the most important aspects of the explosive growth of the Web is the potential for electronic commerce that the Web offers. The novelty of the medium and the ease of access not only lead to interesting market structures, but to different ways of searching for services and interacting with consumers. Over the past four to five years we have seen the appearance of several important Web services for electronic commerce, of which a relatively new instance is the portal site. Examples of portal sites are Yahoo, Excite, and Lycos. Portals attempt to act as a starting point for the users on the Web, exposing the users to advertisement information from sponsors of the portal site. This leads users of the portal to electronic commerce activities, such as travel and consumer electronics.
The business model of portal services consists of two parts. The first one is to have the consumer buy goods directly from the portal or through a partner site. The other strategy involves satisfying the user's information needs locally and in the process present advertising banners that result in revenues to the portal. The mechanics of this approach are relatively simple. Users enter a portal site, search for information, see advertisement information, and then usually leave.
While this model seems to have worked for various companies, it is highly paradoxical in the sense that it confronts the portal with a dilemma. On the one hand, the service strives to generate better and faster results for the users. If the results are presented at the entry point, however, leading users to another site, there is an opportunity cost for the provider. The user never travels deeply into the site, thus missing the advertising and consumer goods that he or she potentially could buy. To solve this dilemma, some search services (e.g., Lycos) have implemented mechanisms that work to prevent users from leaving for other search services (e.g., Excite). When a user of the first service searches for the name of the second service, the first service displays results that attempt to dissuade the user from leaving the first service site by presenting a link back to the first service's search page.
A recent solution to the dilemma resorts to the notion of “stickiness”, whereby the provider attempts to keep consumers at their site by displaying potentially attractive links that only point into their site. This is much in line with standard marketing practices in the commercial world.
To solve this problem we present an alternative approach to the stickiness solution. In order to solve this dilemma, this approach exploits the fact that, given different needs for information goods (a us
Adar Eytan
Huberman Bernardo A.
Eng David Y.
Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner LLP
Xerox Corporation
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