Patent ID: 6961712

Claim:
A consumer product information catalog system for operation on the World Wide Web (WWW), said consumer product information catalog system comprising; a database management subsystem including a relational database containing (i) a plurality of Universal Product Numbers (UPNs) uniquely associated with a plurality of consumer products offered for sale in a stream of commerce, and (ii) a plurality of categorized Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) symbolically linked to each one of said plurality of UPNs, wherein each said categorized UPN points to a consumer product related information resource published on the World Wide Web (WWW) supported by the infrastructure of the Internet; said database management subsystem providing means for manufacturers and/or their agents to dynamically update said relational database, a Consumer Product Information Request (CPIR) enabling servlet tag containing information related to the location of a computer executable servlet; a first Internet information server for publishing a library of the CPIR-enabling Servlet tags on the Internet, said first Internet information server with means for providing to a user's browser, HTML-encoded documents publishable on the WWW with at least one of the CPIR enabling Servlet tags embedded within one of said HTML-encoded documents; a second Internet information server operably connected to said database management subsystem and the infrastructure of the Internet, with means for detecting when at least one of said CPIR-enabling Servlet tags embedded in one of said HTML-encoded documents has been selected, and means for activating said computer executable servlet; wherein said means for activating activates said computer executable servlet, automatically executing a method comprising: loading and running classes so as to perform a UPN-directed search on said database management subsystem, conducting a UPN-directed search carried out within said database management subsystem, and displaying within an Internet-enabled browser, program results from said UPN-directed search, said displaying including a GUI in the form of a menu of categorized URLs pointing to consumer product related information resources published on said WWW and symbolically linked to the UPN corresponding to the selected CPIR-enabling Servlet tag, and said results including a menu of categorized URLs pointing to consumer product related information resources.