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| By Bill Slawski, on August 12, 2007 What assumptions might search engineers hold when they consider displaying results to searchers trying to find information? What kinds of things might they try to do to make it easier users of a search engine? One belief might be that there’s value in presenting contact information for web sites when those pages appear in search results, especially when the site belongs to a business, and the page that shows up in the search result doesn’t contain contact information. Can the search engine make it easier to find that contact information, even make it so that the searcher doesn’t have to actually visit the page? A new patent application from Google, published this past week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), discusses providing contact information such as a telephone number, or address, or even a map to searchers, in Google’s Web search results (as opposed to local search results). Two of the listed inventors are also named inventors on Google’s patent application for Site Links, which are the lists of additional pages from the same domain that sometimes show up under the first link in search results, in response to a query. The idea behind the Site Links patent filing is to make it easier for a searcher to go directly to a final destination page on a domain, without having to search around for that page. Continue reading When Might Google Show Local Search Information in Web Search Results? By Bill Slawski, on August 5, 2007 You sometimes see some odd things when you perform searches in Google. For example, when I searched for [gun shops miami florida] I got this map amongst the results: 
OK, I didn’t expect the Girl Scouts of America as the top result, and I find that part of the result pretty incomprehensible. But beyond that, it was interesting that I used “Florida” as my search term, and “FL” is shown as the query term in the search display that went with the map that shows up at the top of the search result. Why did my query term change from the full state name to the abbreviation? Location Searches Continue reading Girl Scouts with Guns: Geographic Coding in Google Location Searches By Bill Slawski, on July 3, 2007 Google’s LatLong blog recently reported a way of customizing driving directions in a post titled It’s a click & drag situation. The approach is a little easier than the method of customizing directions described in a newly granted patent for Google on tweaking directions from a start point to an end point, but the update and modification of a route with a mouse pointer seems like an intuitive and obvious update to the patent. Google has a short video on how to customize your driving route. More about the patent here: Continue reading Google Patent Granted on Customizing Travel Directions By Bill Slawski, on July 1, 2007 Most of my use of Yahoo’s photosharing application, Flickr, involves posting images from patent applications, so that I can show them here. But I put some photographs on Flickr too, and I’ve even geo-tagged a few of them by dragging them to the location where the shots were taken on a map. Yahoo has another application that works with Flickr, called ZoneTag, that allows you to take a picture with your phone, and upload it immediately to Flickr, with tags associated with the location. My phone doesn’t support it, so I haven’t tried. But it’s interesting. What kinds of things might be possible with all of these images on Flickr that have locations attached to them? I’ve gathered a number of links to recent papers and pages involving Flickr and tagging that describe some of the possibilities. Continue reading Exploring Yahoo’s Photosharing Applications By Bill Slawski, on June 28, 2007 In a digital map system, like Google Earth or Google Maps, it is possible for users to annotate placemarks using brief descriptions relevant to those locations. The Google Earth Community is filled with examples of such placemarks. It’s also possible to come up with your own custom Google Maps using the Google Map API, or using the Google My Maps feature. 
Google has come up with a way of ranking these custom placemarks in different placemark layers, which they’ve referred to as Place Rank. Click on the image for a larger view of placemarks shown in Google Earth. Continue reading Google’s Place Rank and Interestingness – Ranking Geographic Entities in Maps/Earth for Display By Bill Slawski, on June 26, 2007 Imagine owning a baseball related website and sponsoring a layer on Google Earth, where you show all of the major league and minor league ball parks, as well as historically important locations (Babe Ruth’s birthplace, Negro league stadiums, etc.). Consider also including the training camp stadiums. Seriously, ESPN or CBS or Baseball News, or Major League Baseball, please consider doing all of that. Sponsorship of a layer in Google Earth is one of the items discussed in a patent application from Google that came out last week at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): Determining Advertisements Using User Interest Information and Map-based Location Information
Published June 21, 2007
Int. Publication No: WO 2007/070358 A2
Int. App. No: PCT/US2006/046782
Filed: December 8, 2006
Invented by Steve Glassman, Joshy Joseph, Bill Kilday, Giao Nguyen, Dominic Preuss, and Sridhar Ramaswamy Continue reading Google Earth & Maps Advertising Patent Application By Bill Slawski, on June 24, 2007 Google introduced street views to selected areas of their maps recently. Not discussed in Google’s Street View help sections is how those views might help Google improve the accuracy of locations for both the maps, and for Google’s business locations databases. A problem with search engine mapping databases is that the information collected hasn’t always been very accurate, based upon the way that the this kind of information has been collected. Often, GPS location information for some “anchor” street addresses are known for these systems, and the locations for businesses and buildings between the anchors has been interpolated. According to the authors of a new patent application from Google, significant discrepancies are sometimes observed between actual GPS locations and interpolated locations, with actual addresses being off by 100 yards or more. Continue reading Better Business Location Search using OCR with Street Views By Bill Slawski, on June 17, 2007 Advertisers and searchers can benefit when a search engine collects geographic information from the Web and indexes it by associating that geographic information with a system of overlapping and adjacent geographic boundaries for the locations. It can mean using considerably less geographically related keywords to bid upon, and on smarter geographically related search results. In a post from May, Geo Targeted Advertising for Google Maps and Google Earth, I described how Google may use, or anticipate using, an approach like this. Looks like Yahoo is considering it, too. A trio of patent applications from Yahoo were published last week which describe some of the strategies and algorithms that Yahoo may use to gather and organize this kind of data, and use it in search results and advertising. Geographic Boundaries Continue reading Yahoo Patent Filings on Indexing and Advertising Using Geographic Boundaries | Change Language
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