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Showing posts from September, 2011

Apple, location logging, location search and PlaceBase

It's great when a few questions are answered by a single answer: What's Apple's Geo Team , formed when they acquired Placebase , working on? What's Apple doing with the logs they're keeping of user locations ? What can Apple do in location services that Google doesn't already do? Behold a new patent application by Apple that was just published, titled RELEVANCY RANKING FOR MAP-RELATED SEARCH .  This patent looks at how any sort of location-based search system, such as local business search, nearby friend search, etc., can tell the difference between locations that people go to a lot and locations that people don't go to or don't stay in.  In a nutshell, their method looks at logs of locations of lots of users, and from those logs, the method figures out which places get a lot of people going there and which don't. In other words, by looking at where millions of iOS users go, Apple can figure out what places are hot. Their approach to doing thi