Hybrid Indexing and Seamless Ranking of Spatial and Textual Features of Web Documents

Abstract. There is a significant commercial and research interest in locationbased web search engines. Given a number of search keywords and one or more locations that a user is interested in, a location-based web search retrieves and ranks the most textually and spatially relevant web pages. In this type of search, both the spatial and textual information should be indexed. Currently, no efficient index structure exists that can handle both the spatial and textual aspects of data simultaneously and accurately. Existing approaches either index space and text separately or use inefficient hybrid index structures with poor performance. Moreover, most of these approaches cannot accurately rank web-pages based on a combination of space and text and are not easy to integrate into existing search engines. In this paper, we propose a new index structure called Spatial-Keyword Inverted File to handle location-based web searches in an integrated/efficient manner. To seamlessly find and rank rel...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: DEXA
• Authors: Ali Khodaei, Cyrus Shahabi, Chen Li
• Keywords: Database, DEXA 2010, Index Structures, Location-based Web, Location-based Web Search