Has Google Just Patented Geo-Targeting?

[Ace]

Google has been awarded a patent entitled “Determining and/or using location information in an ad system” Check more here at Has Google Just Patented Geo-Targeting? And Copy of patent is here http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-P...e&RS=AN/google

[vivesoftech]

But How will Google benefited from having this patent ?

[wige]

IANAL, but I don't think this patent would cover geo-location in general. It appears that the patent only covers one specific implementation, where geolocation is considered as a factor in the ranking of ads to be displayed. Basically, I read the patent as setting up a system where if an ad has a location associated with it, that ad's relevance to a searcher would increase based on the proximity of the ad's geolocation tag to the location of the user, provided the ad has already been determined to be relevant contextually to the user on the basis of activity, demographics or other metrics.

I don't read this patent as covering or protecting the more general usage of geolocation technology to serve local information to users. It would only seem to be a factor if you are ranking snippets of content to determine what content to display to a user, and only then if those snippets are actual ads. If you have a web site, for example, that aggregates news articles from around the country, and you used a similar method to use geolocation to influence the rankings of articles in your internal site search utility, that would not conflict with the patent, based on the very specific language of the application.