ALEXANDRIA, Va., Dec. 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,499,478, issued on Dec. 16, was assigned to Rakuten Asia Pte. Ltd. (Singapore).

"Method and system for performing product matching on an e-commerce platform" was invented by Muralidhar Sortur (Karnataka, India), Venugopal Rao (Karnataka, India), Pawan Rajpoot (Karnataka, India), Subhanandh Tamilarasu (Karnataka, India), Manjunath Srinivas (Karnataka, India), Ganji Krishna (Karnataka, India) and Sreevidhya Rajakrishnan (Karnataka, India).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An apparatus for performing product matching may include: a processor configured to receive a search as product item for searching for a catalog product that matches a target...