Hyper-local, directions-based ranking of places

Studies find that at least 20% of web queries have local intent; and the fraction of queries with local intent that originate from mobile properties may be twice as high. The emergence of standardized support for location providers in web browsers, as well as of providers of accurate locations, enables so-called hyper-local web querying where the location of a user is accurate at a much finer granularity than with IP-based positioning. This paper addresses the problem of determining the importance of points of interest, or places, in local-search results. In doing so, the paper proposes techniques that exploit logged directions queries. A query that asks for directions from a location a to a location b is taken to suggest that a user is interested in traveling to b and thus is a vote that location b is interesting. Such user-generated directions queries are particularly interesting because they are numerous and contain precise locations. Specifically, the paper proposes a framework...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Petros Venetis, Hector Gonzalez, Christian S. Jensen, Alon Y. Halevy
• Keywords: Computer Networks, Local Intent, Paper, PVLDB 2011, Ranking