Patent Document ID: 9900392
Application ID: 14750509

Base Claim:
1. A method comprising: maintaining one or more groups at an online system, each group including one or more users of the online system, with each user associated with a location; determining a location associated with each of the one or more groups, the location associated with a group based at least in part on locations associated with users in the group, comprising: determining a centroid of the locations associated with users in the group; determining distances between locations associated with each user in the group and the centroid; generating a histogram of the determined distances; and determining the centroid as the location associated with the group in response to at least a threshold percentile of the determined distances from the histogram being less than or equal to a threshold distance; receiving a request from a requesting user of a social networking system to identify one or more groups maintained by the social networking system; determining a plurality of candidate groups for the requesting user from the one or more groups based at least in part on a distance between a location associated with the requesting user and locations associated with each of the one or more groups, a candidate group associated with a location within a threshold distance of the location associated with the user; including the plurality of candidate groups in one or more selection processes selecting a set of groups; and communicating information identifying the selected set of groups to a client device associated with the requesting user for presentation.

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Claim 2:
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the location associated with the group is based at least in part on hometowns associated with each user in the group and specified by the users.