Google Patent on Human-Friendly Driving Directions Based Upon Personalized Landmarks

Google keeps information about your Mobile Location History and the places that you visit. It may remember those places and use them as personalized landmarks in the directions that it shows you in the future. It may also boost those places in Maps search results when it shows them to you. A recently granted Google patent Displaying Personalized Landmarks in a Mapping Application talks about Google’s awareness of places that you have travelled to in the past, and how they could use them as personalized landmarks.

Usually, when someone searches using Google Maps, they specify a starting point and a destination, and the mapping program will display directions immediately and/or as the user travels from the starting point and the destination. This patent suggests that to improve driving directions, navigation directions can be augmented with references to points of interest (also referred to herein as “landmarks”) along the route, such as buildings that standout visually or billboards.

A personalized landmark may be selected from the user’s location history that is:

• Near the selected location
• Based on the frequency and/or recency with which the user visited the landmark

Then the mapping application will present a selected landmark on a map display, to give a user a frame of reference for the chosen location, and a final destination in comparison to it. And they might see in their directions one that could be something like, “Turn right at the intersection after passing Bob’s House”. Check out Bills’ post for the full breakdown.