Patent analyzer extraordinaire Bill Slawski walks us through a Local Search patent application from Google which was just published last week.

In a nutshell, the patent (which may or may not be in use) details the sources where local information might be found, how the structured and unstructured data on those sources can be analyzed and possibly merged, and how “confidence” might be assigned to certain bits of (local) information.

On reading Bill’s explanation, I don’t think I’d change anything I wrote last week in 8 Simple Steps to Make a Page More “Local”.

The background of this patent app — and others like it — is that, for a search engine, local information can be difficult to locate, difficult to extract, difficult to merge with similar or conflicting information, and difficult to have confidence in. So it’s imperative that you, the small business owner, give the search engine as many obvious local signals as you can on your web site (and on other sites where your business is mentioned or listed).

If the science-speak starts to lose you, I’d still suggest you see Bill’s post and go to the end where he presents 6 ideas for seeing that your local information fits into what this patent describes — six ideas that complement the 8 I wrote about last week.

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