Just found out we've been granted a patent for our geosearch work five years ago. Congrats to Charlie, Marty, and Dwight.

There was a proof of concept running on Northern Lights around four or five years ago. Add an address to a search term and the results came back distance sorted (with an optional Mapblast map). This way a search for pizza would show the closest pizza joint at the top of the list. This worked even if the pizza joint was half a mile away but in another state, which most search engines can't deal with. [update: now they can]

This was back at Vicinity, which means the patent is now the property of Microsoft who, as chance might have it, has been showing interest in the search engine business. Lucky them.

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