[petervandijck]

Holy shit faceted search is now attracting patent trolls?

I would do 2 things:

1. Talk to 4 or 5 different patent laywers (for free). Learn.

2. Contact other companies that also use faceted search (everyone does) and ask to talk to the person in charge. Perhaps you can work together?

I'm pretty sure there will be prior art to the patent. The first time I saw faceted search on the web was epinions.com (2001-ish), but it's been described in depth in the 70s or earlier in library science (Ranganathan). Good luck!

[cmarius]

Peter. This patent was filed in 1998. It was reexamined in 2010. You're right that everyone is using it now, and it can be proved that Amazon used it before this patent was filed. However, someone will have to litigate this to bring that prior art into play.