US Patent Issued to GOOGLE on Sept. 1 for "Distance based search ranking demotion" (California Inventor)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Sept. 1 -- United States Patent no. 12,724,784, issued on Sept. 1, was assigned to GOOGLE LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Distance based search ranking demotion" was invented by Neha Arora (San Carlos, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for processing local search results. In one aspect, a method determines a first local document in a set of local documents for search results is eligible for a demotion operation. The determination is based at least in part on a proximity measure based on the location of the user device and a location specified for the first local document. In r...