PTAB

IPR2025-00968

Google LLC v. Bootler LLC

Log In
Key Events
Petition
petition

1. Case Identification

2. Patent Overview

  • Title: Aggregating, Processing, and Presenting Service Data
  • Brief Description: The ’090 patent discloses computer-implemented methods for aggregating data from a plurality of food or beverage delivery services. The system acquires source data, such as restaurant menus, in various formats and processes it into a searchable, aggregated data structure to allow users to search for items across different services.

3. Grounds for Unpatentability

Ground 1: Obviousness over Rahle and Rhodes - Claims 1-7 and 11-17 are obvious over Rahle in view of Rhodes.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Rahle (Application # 2013/0282486) and Rhodes (Patent 10,176,448).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Rahle disclosed a method for aggregating structured information about entities like restaurants and menu items into a searchable “social graph.” Rahle’s system gathered this data from various sources, including third-party websites, using methods like APIs or data scraping, and stored it in a predetermined format of nodes and sub-nodes. Petitioner asserted that Rhodes disclosed a conventional food delivery service that enables customers to order from various restaurants via a website, which presents restaurant menus. The combination of Rahle’s aggregation framework with Rhodes’s specific type of data source (delivery services) allegedly rendered the key limitations of the independent claims obvious.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Rahle with Rhodes to improve Rahle’s data aggregation system. Rahle taught gathering menu information from third-party websites, and Rhodes represented a known type of third-party website—a delivery service—that provided up-to-date restaurant menu data. A POSITA would be motivated to incorporate such data sources to enhance the user experience by providing more comprehensive and accurate information, including valuable structured data like delivery fees, which Rhodes disclosed.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would have a reasonable expectation of success because adapting Rahle’s flexible system to gather data from a delivery service website like that of Rhodes was a simple application of known data aggregation techniques within the skill of a POSITA.

Ground 2: Obviousness over Rahle, Rhodes, and Jin - Claims 1-17 are obvious over Rahle in view of Rhodes and Jin.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Rahle (Application # 2013/0282486), Rhodes (Patent 10,176,448), and Jin (Patent 6,651,057).
  • Core Argument for this Ground:
    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground builds on the Rahle and Rhodes combination by adding the teachings of Jin. Petitioner contended that Jin disclosed techniques for information retrieval that use training documents and score normalization to determine if a document is relevant to a specific topic (e.g., identifying key words). This teaching was argued to be directly applicable to the ’090 patent’s limitations in claims 6-10, which recite training an algorithm using word frequency models to identify identical menu items across different services.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA, seeking to implement Rahle’s process of identifying and associating menu items (attributes) with conceptual food items (sub-nodes), would be motivated to use Jin’s specific techniques. Jin’s method offered a robust and accurate way to determine matches between menu documents and food-topic concepts. This would achieve the benefits taught by Jin, such as a more accurate decision-making process, thereby improving the core functionality of the Rahle/Rhodes system.
    • Expectation of Success: A POSITA would expect success in applying Jin’s information retrieval methods to the food-item matching problem, as these techniques were well within a POSITA's skill to implement via a processor executing instructions.

Ground 3: Obviousness over Rahle, Rhodes, and Belousova - Claims 1-7 and 11-17 are obvious over Rahle in view of Rhodes and Belousova.

  • Prior Art Relied Upon: Rahle (Application # 2013/0282486), Rhodes (Patent 10,176,448), and Belousova (Patent 10,366,434).

  • Core Argument for this Ground:

    • Prior Art Mapping: This ground augmented the Rahle/Rhodes combination with Belousova, which disclosed a restaurant service system that builds a "food taxonomy" to aggregate menus from participating restaurants. Belousova specifically taught using a machine learning-based classifier, trained on menu items, to map different menu item titles to a single canonical "dish." This directly addressed the ’090 patent’s limitations regarding identifying common menu items and associating them with a master menu item.
    • Motivation to Combine: A POSITA implementing the Rahle/Rhodes system would be motivated to incorporate Belousova’s classifier technique to perform the step of mapping menu items to standardized "dishes" (equivalent to Rahle's "sub-nodes"). Belousova provided a specific, effective solution for normalizing menu data, addressing the known problem that the same food item may have different names or spellings across different menus. This would achieve Belousova's stated benefits of superior food search results.
    • Expectation of Success: Success was reasonably expected because classifiers like Belousova's were well-known software modules, and integrating this technique into Rahle’s system would be a straightforward implementation for a POSITA.

  • Additional Grounds: Petitioner asserted an additional obviousness challenge against claims 1-17 based on the combination of Rahle, Rhodes, Belousova, and Jin, which relied on the cumulative motivations and teachings of the prior grounds.

4. Arguments Regarding Discretionary Denial

  • Petitioner argued that discretionary denial is unwarranted because the parallel district court litigation is in a nascent, motion-to-dismiss stage with no trial date set. Furthermore, none of the prior art references asserted in the petition were cited or considered during the prosecution of the ’090 patent.

5. Relief Requested

  • Petitioner requests institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-17 of Patent 11,037,090 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. §103.