Submission -eighth International Www Conference Geoviser: Geo-spatial Clustering and Visualization of Search Engine Results

With the explosive growth of the available information on the internet, navigating the web successfully in order to obtain information has become an important issue. This essentially involves using techniques such as searching for the information using keyword and subject based searches. To the best of our knowledge, most tools which achieve this goal are not designed to nd the geographic location of information sources. In many instances such information could prove to be extremely useful to answer queries with certain geo-spatial elements. Our work focuses on the problem of nding and visually presenting the geographic location associated with the web documents retrieved via a search engine. The research aims to aggregate geographic locations of the retrieved documents to nd the clusters/outliers. We then look at ways of spatially visualizing these results on a map using glyphs and other techniques. The main contribution of this paper is the idea of discovering the geographic location of webpages obtained via a search engine query and visualizing the results by placing them on a map in an attempt to convey spatial attributes such as location and distance. We also look into issues of presenting such data depending on the relevance of the hits, where the relevance depends on factors such as the ranking provided by the search engine or the number of relevant pages retrieved from a website. Current search engines ignore the existence of such geographic meta-data and therefore are unable to process queries which are inherently geo-spatial in nature. Our system (GeoViser) integrates this functionality to supplement the current capabilities of a search engine.