Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that the company has been awarded patent number 7,231,405 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location.
The patent covers local search technology related to identifying location information from web documents, indexing that information and making it searchable geographically. In Local.com’s commercial implementation of the technology, the search results are ranked by search term, LocalRank score, location prominence, among other factors. The system then extracts, matches and indexes web pages from the Internet and generates web references where applicable on more than 16 million local businesses listed nationwide on Local.com.
Patents are a real hot button issue in our industry. What do you all make of this? I’ve sent emails for response from the majors…
Udpate: Donna has a conversation with craigslist CEO here…