Patent Document ID: 8930391
Application ID: 12981082
Patent Status: 1

Claim One:
1. A system comprising: an apparatus that includes at least one processor, the apparatus including a progressive spatial search engine comprising instructions tangibly embodied on a computer readable medium for execution by the at least one processor, the progressive spatial search engine including: a location determination engine configured to determine a location associated with a user of a computing device; a prefix string receiving engine configured to receive a prefix portion of an input string as one or more successive characters of the input string are provided by the user via the computing device; a suggestion engine configured to obtain, via a searching device processor, a list of suggested items associated with valid string completions of the prefix portion, based on a function of respective recommendation indicators and proximities of the suggested items to the location in response to receiving the prefix portion of the input string, based on partially traversing a character string search structure having a plurality of augmented non-terminal nodes that include stored predetermined bound indicators associated with spatial regions, the bound indicators indicating score bounds that are pre-computed, prior to the partially traversing, as distance scores aggregated with recommendation scores that are associated with respective database items that are associated with database item locations within the respective spatial regions, the bound indicators indicating bounds of respective sub-structures of the character string search structure that emanate from the respective augmented non-terminal nodes, the respective sub-structures representing the respective associated spatial regions, the partially traversing including at least one comparison of one of the bound indicators with another value; and a rendering engine configured to return to the user the list of suggested items and descriptive information associated with each suggested item, in response to receiving the prefix portion, for rendering an image illustrating indicators associated with the list of suggested items in a manner relative to the location, as the user provides each successive character of the input string.