rethink(ip)

Things We Hate About The USPTO.gov Website: Trademark "Sessions"

Posted by Stephen M. Nipper at December 12, 2005 01:11 AM

Rethink(IP) reader (and frequent commenter on our previous "hate" posts) Adam Rosi-Kessel [blog] brings you his www.uspto.gov annoyance:

The fact that you can't bookmark a trademark search page is a real annoyance. That is, if you go to http://www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm, click on "SEARCH trademarks," then "Free Form Search (Advanced Search)," and then attempt to bookmark that page and come back an hour later, you'll get a "search session expired" error. Similarly, you can't create a link to a particular search or to a particular trademark record. You are always required to navigate through from the USPTO trademark front page, with no value added but a few additional clicks.

My guess is that it would be a fair amount of work for them to fix this problem fundamentally because they have this whole back end "session based" design. That design, as far as I can tell, is totally unnecessary, but it is the design they have picked.

One workaround would be for their back end to automatically create a new session and redirect you to the page you requested when you attempt to access a deep link that relates to an expired session. They would have to change their URLs to encode information about what navigational steps had been taken to get to that point on the site, in addition to the session information they are currently encoding, but it might be easier than redoing the whole system.

Thanks Adam!

Click here for our previous "things we hate."


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