These untidy queries arrive as an undifferentiated jumble of text—e.g. “pizza los angeles ca”—and while it’s obvious to a human what that means, it’s not so perfectly transparent to a computer. So it’s up to our search engineers to write programs that figure out which parts are the what of the user’s query, and which parts are the where.

We have recently done a bit of work on this front, and would like to share an initial implementation; it’s not perfect, but we hope it handles many common cases. (It works by comparing the sub sequences of words in the query string against known addresses in our database; we use the matches in order to distinguish the geographic terms in the query from the rest. Call it separating the where from the chaff …)

If you’d like to try it out, you can use the field below:

As usual, please use the comments to let us know if you find cases where it ought to work, but doesn’t.