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Geo-Targeted Web Search

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 93 Accesses

Synonyms

Geographic web search; Local web search

Definition

Geo-Targeted Web Search (Geo Search) describes a set of techniques used in web search engines that aim to return more relevant results to users by exploiting geographic knowledge. Most commonly, a Geo Search Engine (a search engine using Geo Search) tries to infer a geographic area of interest for a user query by considering the query itself, the current location of the user, or the search history of the user. The Geo Search Engine then tries to return documents that are relevant to the query search terms and that also match the geographic area of interest of the query, as determined through analysis of the web page itself, any geographic meta tags (geo tags), link or site structure, or other data. As an example, a Geo Search Engine may return to a mobile user a list of restaurants close to the user’s current location given a query “restaurants.” Or a user may explicitly ask for information about tourism attractions in...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

    Torsten Suel

Authors
  1. Torsten Suel
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Suel, T. (2009). Geo-Targeted Web Search. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_176

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