Patent Document ID: 9384289
Application ID: 12977851

Base Claim:
1. A method for determining a geographic location of a user, the method comprising: receiving a query at a search engine from the user searching an inverted index to identify one or more geographical locations associated with one or more terms of the received query, wherein the inverted index comprises plurality of listed query terms, each of which is associated with at least one geographic location and respective relevance score associated therewith, wherein each respective relevance score indicates a level of relevancy of a respective geographical location with the listed query term and is computed based on previously submitted search query terms by at least one user and whether the previously submitted search query terms corresponds to a location specific search query selecting one of the identified one or more geographic locations as the geographic location of the user based on relevance scores associated with the search query and whether the search query is a location specific search query.

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Claim 10:
10. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: generating the inverted index by: determining geographical locations for a plurality of users that submitted search queries, assigning a relevance score to each of the geographical locations based on whether the search query associated with that geographical location is a location-specific search query; annotating each submitted search query with a determined geographical location for a user that submitted the search query, grouping the annotated search queries according to the determined geographical locations into a plurality of location groups, and building an inverted index for each location group that relates each term of the submitted search queries in the location group to one or more geographical locations determined for the users that submitted the search queries that include the terms, and to the corresponding relevance scores for the one or more geographical locations.