Exploiting Geographical Location Information of Web Pages

Abstract

Many information sources on the web are relevant primarily to specific geographical communities. For instance, web sites containing information on restaurants, theatres and apartment rentals are relevant primarily to web users in geographical proximity to these locations. We make the case for identifying and exploiting the geographical location information of web sites so that web applications can rank information in a geographically sensitive fashion. For instance, when a user in Palo Alto issues a query for "Italian Restaurants," a web search engine can rank results based on how close such restaurants are to the user's physical location rather than based on traditional IR measures. In this paper, we first consider how to compute the geographical location of web pages. Subsequently, we consider how to exploit such information in one specific "proof-of-concept" application we implemented in JAVA.