WebProNews

Patent applications are apparently cheaper by the dozen. This month, 12 Google filings were published, mostly involving technologies focused on geo-targeting and local search.

Search Engine Watch has a more complete exploration of the patents and Google Blogoscoped has put together a nifty direct link list to the applications. For our purposes, we'll do a quick summary.

The paten applications involve:

1. Factors to determine if an advertisement matches the content of a page, which include user behavior - whether ads are clicked, the length of time a user stays, and if there are conversions.

2. Aiding advertisers to better target ads by broadening the scope of targeting information used. This includes concept keywords, and an incorporation of cost per selection and cost per conversion.

3. A method for personalizing traffic and transportation routing over a wireless device.

4. Optimizing ad layouts, from size, fonts, and congestion.

5. Automated advertisement approval, comparing ads with ad policies on various online ad servers, and suggestions if ad is not approved.

6. Location-specific advertising and the incorporation of contact information.

7. A system for determining how authoritative a web document is.

8. Analysis of white space as a visual indicator of content segments.

9. Indexing multiple geographic identifiers on a page and determining a set of relevant surrounding geographies.

10. Collecting ambiguous geographic references, though the exact location may not be identified, and determining the location from clues on the page.

11. A system to determine if general web results should be returned or local search results.

12. A system for matching addresses with business information and assigning confidence scores based on the information on the webpage to return local item information.

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Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.