How Groupon Automatically Categorizes Merchant Services Using Text Analysis
A system that automatically scans merchant websites and uses high-precision search queries to label their services, helping platforms like Groupon organize thousands of business listings.
Original patent title: “Method, apparatus, and computer program product for classification and tagging of textual data”
A system that automatically scans merchant websites and uses high-precision search queries to label their services, helping platforms like Groupon organize thousands of business listings. Granted to Groupon Inc in 2016 with 18 claims and 25 forward citations.
Key facts
Coverage
What does this patent actually cover?
This patent describes a way to teach a computer how to read a merchant's website and figure out what service they offer, such as 'spa' or 'auto repair.' It works by first looking at a large collection of known documents to build search queries that are highly accurate, measured by a precision score. The system calculates this score by dividing the number of 'true positive' results by the total number of results found. Once these high-quality queries are refined, the system applies them to new, unlabeled text from a merchant's site to automatically assign the correct category label.
The gap
What does this patent NOT cover?
- Does not cover general-purpose search engines that do not use a specific precision-threshold-based query selection process.
- Does not cover manual tagging or human-in-the-loop classification systems.
- Does not cover machine learning models that classify text without using the specific feature-index-pair and distance-measure query generation method described.
- Does not cover image-based merchant classification.
These exclusions are unique to PatentBrief — derived from the actual claim language, not patent-office boilerplate.
What made this novel
The system generates queries based on 'feature index pairs'—tracking not just the words, but their specific positions in a sentence—and then filters those queries by a precision threshold to ensure only the most reliable indicators are used for classification.
Schematic visualization of the patent's claim structure. Hand-drawn diagrams in progress for each landmark patent.
Where you've seen this
Real-world examples
Automated categorization of local business listings on Groupon
Internal merchant classification tools for daily deal platforms
Automated tagging of unstructured web content for recommendation engines
Why it matters
The bigger picture
For companies like Groupon that aggregate thousands of local deals, manually categorizing every merchant is impossible. This technology allowed them to scale their marketplace by automating the classification of unstructured text found on merchant websites, ensuring that a user searching for 'massage' actually finds relevant spa deals.
Filed
May 13, 2013
Granted
May 3, 2016
Market context
Who's building on this
Companies in this space
Groupon continues to utilize automated merchant classification to manage its vast inventory of local deals. Similar techniques are used by major search engines and local discovery platforms to map the unstructured web into structured business directories.
Market impact
This patent helped standardize the automated ingestion of merchant data for the daily deal industry. By reducing the reliance on manual data entry, it enabled platforms to expand into new geographic markets and service categories much faster than competitors relying on human editors.
Claim 1 — Plain English
What this patent covers
This patent describes a way to teach a computer how to read a merchant's website and figure out what service they offer, such as 'spa' or 'auto repair.' It works by first looking at a large collection of known documents to build search queries that are highly accurate, measured by a precision score. The system calculates this score by dividing the number of 'true positive' results by the total number of results found. Once these high-quality queries are refined, the system applies them to new, unlabeled text from a merchant's site to automatically assign the correct category label.
The clever bit
The system generates queries based on 'feature index pairs'—tracking not just the words, but their specific positions in a sentence—and then filters those queries by a precision threshold to ensure only the most reliable indicators are used for classification.
What it does not cover
- Does not cover general-purpose search engines that do not use a specific precision-threshold-based query selection process.
- Does not cover manual tagging or human-in-the-loop classification systems.
- Does not cover machine learning models that classify text without using the specific feature-index-pair and distance-measure query generation method described.
- Does not cover image-based merchant classification.
Patent timeline
Application submitted to the patent office
Application published, typically 18 months after filing
Patent officially issued
PatentBrief Score
Impact Score
Moderate
Citation count
28/40
Moderately cited
Claim breadth
12/20
Broad claimsclaimsThe numbered statements at the end of a patent that legally define what the inventor owns.Read more →
Recency
5/20
Granted 10–20 years ago
Assignee scale
0/20
Independent or smaller assigneeassigneeThe entity that owns the patent — usually the inventor's employer or a company.Read more →
PatentBrief Impact Score — based on citation count, claim breadth, recency, and assignee scale. Not a legal assessment.
Heuristic Value Estimate
What this patent might be worth
$131K – $419K
Midpoint $262K · 6.9 yr remaining · industry ×1.6
Heuristic only — blends forward/backward citation counts, claim scope, time remaining, litigation history, and CPC-derived industry baseline. Real valuations need a professional appraisal.
The original legal language
Original claims
18 claims as filed with the patent office.
Concepts involved
Citations
Patent lineage
Cite this patent
Pendar, N. (2016). How Groupon Automatically Categorizes Merchant Services Using Text Analysis (U.S. Patent No. 9,330,167). U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. https://patentbrief.org/patent/us/9330167/amazon-rds
Auto-generated from the patent record. Double-check author order and the issue date against the official USPTO document before submitting.
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Common Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
What does How Groupon Automatically Categorizes Merchant Services Using Text Analysis cover?
A system that automatically scans merchant websites and uses high-precision search queries to label their services, helping platforms like Groupon organize thousands of business listings.
Who owns patent US 9330167?
Groupon Inc owns this patent, granted in 2016.
When does this patent expire?
This patent is expected to expire on May 3, 2036, when the invention enters the public domain.
What is patent US 9330167 cited by?
This patent has been cited by 25 later patents that build on its ideas.
What problem does this patent solve?
For companies like Groupon that aggregate thousands of local deals, manually categorizing every merchant is impossible. This technology allowed them to scale their marketplace by automating the classification of unstructured text found on merchant websites, ensuring that a user searching for 'massage' actually finds relevant spa deals.
What does this patent NOT cover?
Does not cover general-purpose search engines that do not use a specific precision-threshold-based query selection process.
Patent monitoring