Appeal No. 2006-1342
Application No. 09/488,471
Applying these principles to the instant rejection, we note that the examiner admits that
BizRate is deficient in teaching an indexing of the rating data, storing the rating data indexed by
the off-line ranking system, updating cumulative business satisfaction ratings from the users’ off-
line ranking system, and automatically causing the off-line ranking system to re-index the rating
data and further causing the result sorter to generate ranked matches based on the re-indexed
rating data. In fact, BizRate appears to have a very meager disclosure of the means for causing
many of its disclosed functions. It does, however, clearly suggest the general idea of the rating of
merchants by customers and the display of those ratings on the WWW to interested customers or
potential customers.
Thus, taking independent claim 1 as exemplary, BizRate teaches a 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. Appellant argues that the reference does not teach basing the
ranking on an “unrestricted pool of merchants” because the reference is concerned only with
certain merchants, citing, at page 8 of the examiner’s copy of the reference of record, “we don’t
want to list every merchant on the Web, only those that can serve you best!” However, we agree
with the examiner that the original pool of merchants from which BizRate selects is from the
WWW and is as “unrestricted” as appellant’s pool. If BizRate chooses to eliminate certain ones
of merchants and rank only those in the pool of merchants chosen from the original unrestricted
pool, that is BizRate’s choice, but that selection is originally made from the unrestricted pool of
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