GroupBy Secures US Patent for Methods of Augmenting Search Engines for eCommerce Information Retrieval

TORONTO, Sept. 25, 2017 -- GroupBy Inc. (www.groupbyinc.com), a leading provider of relevancy-focused eCommerce solutions and one of Canada’s fastest growing technology companies, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Patent No. 9,672,552 protecting the technology behind the Company’s site search and navigation solutions. The patent protects a system for facilitating queries against search engines such as Lucene, Solr, Elastic Search or any other readily available search engines to provide meaningful content for the purpose of supporting any eCommerce website.

“The grant of this patent recognizes the leadership of GroupBy and our technology in the marketplace along with the need for improved search and navigation solutions for retailers to compete in an ever-growing competitive marketplace,” said Roland Gossage, CEO at GroupBy Inc and one of the inventors listed on the U.S. Patent. “Having designed, developed and delivered the most impactful search and navigation enhancement technology for digital retailers, this marks a tremendous milestone in the Company’s history and we are proud to bring this level of recognition to our product team, our deployment team and to our shareholders.”

The U.S. Patent, entitled “Methods of Augmenting Search Engines for eCommerce Information Retrieval” was granted on June 6, 2017, and defines in detail the protected methods that provide for an intelligent abstraction to know when and how to generate a set of queries as they relate to digital commerce and includes areas such as the configuration of metadata used by a search engine to define relevant results specifically for eCommerce. This innovation was designed to augment and improve the deficiencies found in generic search engines as they relate to search, navigation, merchandising and overall user experience, which in turn works to improve conversion rates, average order values and other tangible benefits for retailers online.

“The challenge of serving relevant search results by simply querying a search engine such as Lucene, Solr or Elastic Search does not effectively solve the user’s search intent and therefore GroupBy had to create this innovation and subsequent patented method to solve this problem for eCommerce,” said Will Warren, CTO at GroupBy Inc and one of the co-inventors for the Patent. “This method of analysing, evaluating and augmenting the query and subsequent returned response allows us to achieve this fundamentally better user experience for eCommerce.”

“This award by the U.S. patent law regime solidifies the importance of what GroupBy has achieved in terms of innovation excellence within the eCommerce space,” continued Gossage. “This patent is the first granted among a series of patent applications that we have pending and we will proudly protect and enforce all of our intellectual property rights in relation to these valuable assets.”

GroupBy serves many of the world’s most successful online retailers including CVS, Urban Outfitters, Crate & Barrel, Pier 1 Imports, Jos A. Bank, Cabela’s, Lancôme, BuildDirect, Columbia Sports, Zoro Tools, The Shopping Channel and dozens more. GroupBy has a comprehensive patent strategy in place with additional applications under review in the U.S. and internationally. 

For more information:

Dan Thompson
GroupBy Inc.
Chief Marketing Officer
[email protected] 

About GroupBy Inc.
GroupBy Inc. transforms the way retailers interact with their consumers online through data-driven commerce, media, and knowledge management software solutions. The company supports the online retail efforts of many of the world’s leading online retailers by driving more targeted site traffic and increasing revenues through its Searchandiser platform. GroupBy’s solutions provide industry-leading features for search, navigation, merchandising, search engine optimization (SEO) and search as you type (SAYT). On June 5, 2017, GroupBy announced that it had acquired US-based product data enrichment software provider, Edgecase. Founded in 2013, GroupBy is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and has offices around the world. For more information, please visit www.groupbyinc.com.