ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,229,843, issued on Feb. 18, was assigned to Airbnb Inc. (San Francisco).
"Flexible destination search" was invented by Sebastien Pierre Romain Dubois (San Francisco), Pauline Nguyen (Columbia Falls, Mont.), Dillon Davis (San Francisco) and Karen Ouyang (San Francisco).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A flexible listings search system can receive and return results for flexible listing searches. For example, the system can perform micro-flexible searches (e.g., plus or minus a few days) or super flexible searches (e.g., a time span in one or more months), using listing arrays that can be rapidly accessed to efficiently identify and return re...