Google's Address Geocoding patent

 

That's right.. details of the pattent are as follows... A geocoding component generates geographic coordinate information, such as latitude and longitude values, for postal addresses. A table includes a number of rows, each corresponding to one or more addresses. The geocoding component can quickly locate a particular row in the table based on a number of input address identifiers as the intersection of the sets rows that correspond to each of the address terms. The geocoding component may operate on addresses that are received by the geocoding component or extracted from documents. See http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=/netahtml/search-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=ptxt&S1=google$.ASNM.&OS=an/google$&RS=AN/google$ for complete details of the patent