Patent ID: 7634465

Claim:
A computer-implemented system that facilitates caching of local results for location-based queries, comprising: a cache with a plurality of bags stored therein, wherein each respective bag stores results of a previous location-based query in a location-independent manner while still preserving geographic location information associated with the previous location-based query, wherein each respective bag is associated with a location-independent key that relates to a search string of the previous location-based query that returned the results stored in the bag, and wherein the results stored in each respective bag are documents that include the location-independent key and are ranked in order based upon at least one of criteria of the previous location-based query or a document ID; and a search component that: receives a location-based query, generates a location-independent search string key by removing geographic location information from the received location-based query while still preserving the geographic location information, selects a subset of the plurality of bags in the cache in which the location-independent key associated with each respective bag matches the generated location-independent search-string key, selects a best bag from the selected subset of bags that stores the best available results for the received query by comparing the preserved geographic location information associated with each of the bags in the selected subset of bags to the preserved geographic location information of the received location-based query and identifying as the best bag the bag associated with a geographic location nearest to the geographic location associated with the received query, and returns a subset of results stored in the best bag when the best bag meets a threshold, even if the geographic location associated with the received location-based query is not an exact match with the geographic location associated with the best bag.