Location-based Web Search

In recent years, the relation of Web information to a physical location has gained much attention. However, Web content today often carries only an implicit relation to a location. In this paper, we present a novel location-based search engine that automatically derives spatial context from unstructured Web resources and allows for location-based search: Our focused crawler applies heuristics to crawl and analyze Web pages that have a high probability to carry a spatial relation to a certain region or place; the location extractor identifies the actual location information from the pages; our indexer assigns a geo-context to the pages and makes them available for a later spatial Web search. We illustrate the usage of our spatial Web search for location-based applications that provide information not only right-in-time but right-on-the-spot.