Geographic Information Retrieval

Due to the abundance of information, querying the World Wide Web has become increasingly difficult. Geographic properties of Internet resources can be directly used for making Internet search more personalized and for increasing the quality of results. However, little work has been done in this area so far and the general direction of research and development has been uncertain. In this paper, essential questions in this field are addressed: First, we outline a three-stage architecture for an efficient and effective mapping of Internet resources to geographic locations. Geospatial search engines are one important application of this mapping. Such search engines fundamentally differ from their traditional counterparts, particularly in respect to selecting and ranking search results. Finally, we propose geospatial analyses using localized web crawls. Such analyses allow the support of new types of queries as well as the reduction of cost compared to conventional data-collection techniques. The paper concludes with an overview on challenging research questions.