Appeal No. 2006-0567
Application 09/938,256
admitted by appellants in this statement since appellants
recognize that the Zhu system receives a search query input from
the user, thus necessitating a search query to be outputted to
the user from which a received response may be captured.
Since we agree with the examiner’s view that Zhu does
pose the examiner-characterized implicit questions to a user, we
do not agree with appellants’ ultimate conclusion that there was
no motivation for the artisan to have combined Zhu with Kagami.
If Zhu does not pose any form of questions to the user, we would
tend to agree with appellants’ view that there would have been
no motivation to have combined Zhu with Kagami as expressed
initially at pages 12 and 13 of the principal Brief on appeal.
The basic premise of the examiner’s position at page 4
of the Answer is that it would have been obvious for the artisan
to have combined the teaching of Kagami’s disclosure of posing a
series of explicit questions to users and then receiving explicit
user responses thereto as a means of enhancing the implicit
question approach the examiner has characterized in Zhu which
fails to expressly disclose explicit questions to the user. This
basic position of the examiner is recognized at page 4 of the
Reply Brief. Since we agree with the examiner’s basic view that
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