Identification and automatic propagation of geo-location associations to un-located documents

• US 20070112777A1
• Filed: 11/08/2005
• Published: 05/17/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 11/08/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Rose, Daniel, Field, Daniel
• Granted Patent: US 7,792,870 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9537 Spatial or temporal dependent retrieval, e.g. spatiotemporal queries
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/918 Location
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/919 Geographic

Abstract

Systems and methods are provided for identifying pages that can be authoritatively, to some confidence level or another, associated with a geographic location, and systems and methods for grouping documents such that authoritative location associations can be propagated from pages with higher location confidence to pages with lower location confidence. Pages might be identified with authoritative indicators, groups of pages identified including at least one addressed page and at least one unaddressed page, wherein an addressed page is a page having a higher confidence level than an unaddressed page, and at least one processing step performed that is location specific. The confidence level assigned to a page as part of the process represents the confidence that the page is associated with an identifiable geographic location, with documents having a high confidence level being determined to be strongly associated with a particular geographic location while documents having a low confidence level being determined to be weakly associated with a particular geographic location or not associated at all with a geographic location.

Claims

1. In a computerized system for searching a corpus of documents, a method of geographically-based processing comprising:

identifying documents within the corpus that contain authoritative geographic location information, such documents being addressed documents;

identifying groups of documents, wherein at least one identified group of documents includes at least one addressed document and at least one unaddressed document, the at least one unaddressed document being a document that contains either no authoritative geographic location information or unauthoritative geographic location information;

for at least one unaddressed document in the at least one identified group, propagating an authoritative geographic location to that document from an addressed document that is a member of the at least one identified group, such documents being propagated-addressed documents; and

performing location-specific processing on at least one such propagated-addressed document using its propagated authoritative geographic location.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises street addresses.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises longitude and latitude.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises map coordinates.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises relative distances from predefined points.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein predefined points include a geographic location associated with a searcher.

7. The method of claim 5, wherein predefined points include a geographic location indicated as a preference item by a searcher.8. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises distance from a predefined path.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises containment within a political boundary.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein authoritative geographic location information comprises containment within a commercially defined region.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein addressed documents are documents identified as top-level pages of a website.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein addressed documents are contact documents generated for the purpose of providing contact information.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein the documents are web pages and identifying groups of documents comprises identifying web pages that are share membership in pages of a website.

15. The method of claim 1, wherein the documents are web pages and identifying groups of documents comprises comparing URLs of the web pages.

16. The method of claim 1, wherein performing location-specific processing comprises filtering search results comprising a plurality of documents using propagated authoritative geographic locations for the documents in the plurality of documents.

17. The method of claim 1, wherein performing location-specific processing comprises processing that takes into account one or more of processing according to local customs and time zones for the propagated authoritative geographic locations.

18. The method of claim 1, wherein performing location-specific processing comprises ranking search results comprising a plurality of documents using propagated authoritative geographic locations for the documents in the plurality of documents.

10. The method of claim 10, wherein commercially defined regions are neighborhoods.

11. The method of claim 11, wherein neighborhoods are geographic regions defined for purposes of evaluating and/or searching real estate and/or neighborhood-based real estate information.