Patent ID: 7080064

Claim:
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 on-line ranking system for receiving any of users' on-line surveys or feedback about businesses; the on-line ranking system generating rating data from the any of the users' on-line surveys or feedback; wherein the rating data correlates higher quality search matches to higher business satisfaction ratings; wherein the on-line ranking system indexes the rating data; an on-line ranking repository for storing the rating data indexed by the on-line ranking system; a result sorter for sorting query results generated by the search engine, based on the rating data from the on-line 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' on-line surveys or feedback automatically cause the on-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.