With the popularity of powerful, location-enabled mobile devices, user interest in quickly locating information about nearby places of interest has grown. To address this interest, systems and methods have been determined for retrieving information based on a determined geographical location. However, quickly finding relevant information about nearby places of interest may be tedious and burdensome.
Systems may, for example, identify a geographic location of a mobile device that submits a user query, such as by using global positioning system (GPS) information from the mobile device or tower triangulation techniques. Such information may be used by a server system to perform a “local” search, wherein search results located near the device's reported location are preferred over other results. Such techniques may be used to return the names of restaurants around a user, such as when the user submits “Italian restaurants” as a query on her mobile device.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds