Software developer SpeedTrack has filed a lawsuit against major online retailers, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Overstock.com, Nike, Costco and Dell. SpeedTack accuses the major online retailers of infringing their patent alleging that it covered a search mechanism that customers use to locate products on their websites.

The complaint, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the defendants of infringing U.S. Patent Number 5,544,360, titled “Method for accessing computer files and data, using linked categories assigned to each data file record on entry of the data file record”.

The system is designed to guide users to contextually relevant information when searching specific keywords, ensuring a result rather than a page that says “no result can be found”.

The system allows the user to define a virtually unlimited number of hybrid folders by describing, using terms of their own selection, the file contents of those files which are to belong to particular hybrid folders. Such hybrid folders can be implemented on top of, and used in addition to, the normal hierarchical structured directory, or they may replace such normal structures entirely. The inventive computer file control system could therefore be used as the basis of a new computer operating system. In the process of search and retrieval, the invention ensures in two ways that the user defines a filter which will always find at least one file. The user is not required to type the key words to search but instead chooses the words from pick lists, making mistyping impossible. As the user builds the search filter definition, categories which would find no data are automatically excluded as pick list possibilities.