Best Approach to put networking into a service?

So I am new to ionic and have an app I am working on. It has a bunch of views and a bunch of http.get calls. I decided I want to move all of the http get calls out of my controller files and into a nice service called ‘Queries’, but I can’t seem to figure out a viable approach. I believe the problem has to do with $http being asynchronous. Here is what I have tried:

  1. moving my code verbatim to the service:

    someQueryFunc = function( ) {
    var stuff = {}
    $http.get(blahblahblah).then(function successCallback(response) {
    stuff = response.data
    }, function errorCallback(response) {
    //handles error
    });
    return stuff;
    };

  2. Changing the return (to avoid returning ‘stuff = { }’):

    someQueryFunc = function( ) {
    $http.get(blahblahblah).then(function successCallback(response) {
    return response.data
    }, function errorCallback(response) {
    //handles error
    });
    };

  3. Passing the object from $scope and hoping pass-by-reference solves my problem:

    someQueryFunc = function(objPassedInFromScope) {
    $http.get(blahblahblah).then(function successCallback(response) {
    objPassedInFromScope = response.data
    }, function errorCallback(response) {
    //handles error
    });
    };

but these are all no goes. Any ideas? I imagine that something like this must be a regular design pattern that i just haven’t seen in ionic yet, pointers to good examples appreciated.