11855922 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 21, 2016)

Ex Parte Gross

Patent Trial and Appeal BoardSep 21, 2016

11855922 (P.T.A.B. Sep. 21, 2016)

UNITED STA TES p A TENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE APPLICATION NO. FILING DATE 111855,922 09/14/2007 23694 7590 09/23/2016 Law Office of J, Nicholas Gross, Prof Corp, POBOX9489 BERKELEY, CA 94709 FIRST NAMED INVENTOR JOHN NICHOLAS GROSS UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE United States Patent and Trademark Office Address: COMMISSIONER FOR PATENTS P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, Virginia 22313-1450 www .uspto.gov ATTORNEY DOCKET NO. CONFIRMATION NO. JNG2007-l 7891 EXAMINER PULLIAM, CHRISTY ANN R ART UNIT PAPER NUMBER 2164 NOTIFICATION DATE DELIVERY MODE 09/23/2016 ELECTRONIC Please find below and/or attached an Office communication concerning this application or proceeding. The time period for reply, if any, is set in the attached communication. Notice of the Office communication was sent electronically on above-indicated "Notification Date" to the following e-mail address( es): j ngross@pac bell. net chris@patentbest.com eofficeaction@appcoll.com PTOL-90A (Rev. 04/07) UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE BEFORE THE PATENT TRIAL AND APPEAL BOARD Ex parte JOHN NICHOLAS GROSS Appeal2015-000880 Application 11/855,922 Technology Center 2100 Before CAROLYN D. THOMAS, JEFFREYS. SMITH, and TERRENCE W. McMILLIN, Administrative Patent Judges. SMITH, Administrative Patent Judge. DECISION ON APPEAL Appeal2015-000880 Application 11/855,922 STATEivIENT OF THE CASE This is an appeal under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 134(a) from the Examiner's Final Rejection of claims 1-24, which are all the claims pending in the application. We have jurisdiction under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 6(b). We affirm-in-part. Illustrative Claim 1. A method for causing a search engine to down rank a target page designated by a first party, wherein the search engine is not managed or operated by the first party and wherein the search engine includes logic to identify a result set of pages selected from a corpus of pages that are deemed responsive to an input query and includes logic to rank at least some of the result pages of the result set, wherein the ranking is used perform one or more of ordering presentation of some of the pages of the result set and filtering out some of the pages of the result set, the method comprising: identifying a target page to be down ranked; wherein said target page includes hypertext markup language (HTML) content with a set of one or more links to other pages; taking an action to make the target page less accessible to an input query than the target page was before taking the action, including modifying the target page by automatically removing rank enhancing links from said set of one or more links on said target page with a computing system; and modifying at least one of a related page and a related server with the computing system to make the target page appear to a search engine to be web spam, without modifying how the search engine processes the input query. 2 Appeal2015-000880 Application 11/855,922 Dutta Zeng Prior Art US 6,684,254 Bl US 2005/0071465 Al Examiner's Rejection Jan.27,2004 Mar. 31, 2005 Claims 1-24 stand rejected under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 103(a) as being unpatentable over Dutta and Zeng. ANALYSIS Section 103(a) rejection of claims 1-5, 12-20, 21, 23, and 24 Appellant contends Dutta and Zeng do not teach "modifying the target page by automatically removing rank enhancing links from said set of one or more links on said target page," as recited in claim 1. See Reply Br. 2-3. The Examiner finds Dutta teaches web documents that modify and remove links, and Zeng teaches intentionally down ranking pages by selectively filtering links in the Page Rankings wherein a page rank decreases because links raising its ranking have been removed. Ans. 2-3. Appellant argues Zeng's implicit links used for page ranking do not represent rank enhancing links from the set of links on a target page, because Zeng' s implicit links are artificial links for page ranking and are not actual links. Reply Br. 2. However, Appellant's contention is not commensurate with the scope of the claim. Claim 1 recites the removed links are rank enhancing links and that they are from a set of links on said target page. The scope of the claimed "rank enhancing links," when read in light of Appellant's Specification, encompass links that raise a page's rank as taught by Zeng. Appellant also contends Dutta and Zeng do not teach "modifying at least one of a related page and a related server with the computing system to 3 Appeal2015-000880 Application 11/855,922 make the target page appear to a search engine to be web spam," as recited in claim 1. Reply Br. 3. In particular, Appellant contends that pages with links to infringing content, as shown in Dutta, are not classified by prior art search engines as "web spam." Reply Br. 3--4. The Examiner finds the scope of "web spam" for the purposes of making "the target page appear to a search engine to be web spam" encompasses Zeng' s retention of links for contents of low value relevance or low score based on Page Ranking analysis, wherein the result is that a typical search engine could consider the page as spam. Ans. 3. Appellant's contention does not persuasively rebut the Examiner's finding that Zeng's modifying links designated with low scores to lower the ranking of a page teaches modifying a related page to make a target page appear to be web spam within the meaning of claim 1. We agree with the Examiner that the scope of the claimed "web spam" encompasses low value relevance and low score pages shown in the modified links and PageRank values analysis in Paragraphs 19-21 of Zeng. We sustain the rejection of claim 1 under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 103(a). Claims 2-5, 12-21, 23, and 24 not separately argued, fall with claim 1. Section 103(a) rejection of claims 6--11 and 22 Claim 6 recites "said explicit links are created by the computing system at a frequency rate sufficient to reduce said first ranking." The Examiner finds this limitation is taught in Zeng. Final Act. 7-8 (citing Zeng ii 19). Appellant contends that Zeng does not mention a frequency rate for creating explicit links. App. Br. 18. According to Appellant, the term "frequency" in Zeng relates to how many times something appears in a 4 Appeal2015-000880 Application 11/855,922 document, not a rate of link creation. Id. We agree with Appellant. Paragraph 19 of Zeng describes "a frequency for each of the ordered pairs is determined" and "a minimum support threshold is defined and applied to ... each of the ordered pairs. If a frequency is below the minimum support threshold, the associated ordered pair is discarded. Otherwise, the ordered pair is kept and used to update the implicit links graph." The Examiner has not persuasively explained how the combination of Dutta and Zeng teaches "said explicit links are created by the computing system at a frequency rate sufficient to reduce said first ranking," as recited in claim 6. We do not sustain the rejection of independent claim 6, or dependent claims 7-11 and 22, under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 103(a). DECISION The rejection of claims 1-5, 12-20, 21, 23, and 24 under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 103(a) as unpatentable over Dutta and Zeng is affirmed. The rejection of claims 6-11 and 22 under 35 U.S.C. Â§ 103(a) as unpatentable over Dutta and Zeng is reversed. No time period for taking any subsequent action in connection with this appeal may be extended under 37 C.F.R. Â§ 1.136(a)(l )(iv). See 37 C.F.R. Â§ 41.50(f). AFFIRMED-IN-PART 5