Appeal No. 2006-1342
Application No. 09/488,471
merchants on the WWW. In any event, it would have been obvious to the artisan to limit the
pool of merchants to the “unrestricted” pool of merchants on the WWW or to any smaller subset
of that unrestricted pool.
Moreover, it is clear that the customers in BizRate provide surveys or feedback (whether
on-line or off-line) about the businesses they rate and that this information is received by the
ranking system in BizRate which then generates rating data from those surveys/feedback. These
ratings correlate higher quality search matches to higher business satisfaction ratings.
However, as far as the claimed subject matter is concerned, this is as far as we can take
BizRate. We must look to Peters, in accordance with the examiner’s rejection, for the omitted
claimed subject matter, e.g., for the indexing of the rating data, storage of the indexed rating data,
and updating of cumulative business satisfaction ratings to automatically cause the off-line
ranking system to re-index the rating data.
Peters deals with processing large amounts of data obtained from opinion polls by
electronic mail for marketing purposes (column 1, lines 50-51; column 2, lines 48-55). A
database is created for storing information, e.g., e-mail addresses of respondents (column 4, lines
28-30). Peters mentions an “index on the database” (column 30, line 13) and discloses a collator
of survey information updating the database with answers to a survey (column 22, lines 12-13.
However, taking Peters as a whole, there is no indication that the “index” referred to at
column 30 has any resemblance to the claimed feature of indexing “rating data.” Further,
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