Appeal No. 2006-1342
Application No. 09/488,471
Representative independent claim 1 is reproduced as follows:
1. A self-correcting system for use with a search engine to rank search results
based upon a ranking of businesses that are selected from an unrestricted pool of
merchants, comprising:
an off-line ranking system for receiving any of users’ off-line surveys or feedback
about businesses;
the off-line ranking system generating rating data from the any of the users’ off-
line surveys or feedback;
wherein the rating data correlates higher quality search matches to higher business
satisfaction ratings;
wherein the off-line ranking system indexes the rating data;
a ranking repository for storing the rating data indexed by the off-line ranking
system;
a result sorter for sorting query results generated by the search engine, based on
the rating data from the ranking repository, and for generating ranked matches;
a profile manager for creating a user profile history from a user’s address;
wherein the user profile history enables the user to update a rating that was
previously provided by the user, and disables the user from revising ratings provided by
other users; and
wherein updated cumulative business satisfaction ratings from the users’ off-line
surveys or feedback automatically cause the off-line ranking system to re-index the rating
data, and further cause the result sorter to generate ranked matches based on the re-
indexed rating data.
2
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