Categorizing web queries according to geographical locality

Web pages (and resources, in general) can be characterized according to their geographical locality. For example, a web page with general information about wildflowers could be considered a global page, likely to be of interest to a geographically broad audience. In contrast, a web page with listings on houses for sale in a specific city could be regarded as a local page, likely to be of interest only to an audience in a relatively narrow region. Similarly, some search engine queries (implicitly) target global pages, while other queries are after local pages. For example, the best results for query [wildflowers] are probably global pages about wildflowers such as the one discussed above. However, local pages that are relevant to, say, San Francisco are likely to be good matches for a query [houses for sale] that was issued by a San Francisco resident or by somebody moving to that city. Unfortunately, search engines do not analyze the geographical locality of queries and users, and...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Luis Gravano, Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou, Richard Lichtenstein
• Keywords: CIKM 2003, Geographical Locality, Global Pages, Web Page