I read today that Google can use the regional preferences of other people in your area to respond to your search input with locally tailored results.
This allows autocompletion, based on a single character, which is characteristic of the country you are in. That is a little spooky, but it also offers the prospect of today’s invention.
If you happen to be unsure of where you are in the world (perhaps having been kidnapped or hijacked), you can simply type in an alphabet and arrive at a reasonably good estimate of your national-level domain (among 178 or so).
This would be done by activating a very simple app on your phone which would ignore your personal search history and output the name of state in which you found yourself.
Given that search companies increasingly record people’s GPS location and correlate that with search history, this autocomplete technique could be used for even finer-grained determination of where you are.
