Twelve patent applications have been published by Google on July 11. They include seven covering geographical information and local search, which shows the way the company is moving.

SearchEngineWatch list them as follows:

(1) How good a match ads may be to the content on pages they are served upon through a program like Adsense.
(2) A process for improving the targeting of ads.
(3) Real time transporation data for travelers.
(4) An exploration of ad layouts.
(5) An automated advertising approval process.
(6) Reasons for location-based businesses to use local area advertising, including an improved pay-per-call process.
(7) How the most authoritative local search results are identified.
(8) The use of visual gap segmentation to separate information on different parts of pages, with implications beyond local search.
9) Ties business locations with regional areas.
10) A method for reducing ambiguity in geographic location.
(11) Deciding whether regular or local results might be shown when at least one query term might be geographical in nature.
(12) Assigning confidence scores between business identity and location information on a page.

Person-specific advertising on IP-TV still appears to be Google’s long-term goal.