Many popular online services provide "local" or "yellow-pages" search, but none of them allow users to customize the search over user-specified data. Instead, searches are performed over spatial data provided by data aggregators. This paper describes a novel system for providing custom local search over user-provided custom spatial datasets logically combined with detailed streetlevel vector data. We present the algorithms and architecture underlying our prototype system, which can handle a range of queries, including complex queries with ambiguities and misspellings. We show that the system provides custom local search with precision and recall figures that often exceed that of a commercial local search service. Further, we show that our system scales gracefully with the number of individual custom data sets being served simultaneously.
Naren Datha, Tanuja Joshi, Joseph Joy, Vibhuti S.