Clustering and Geo-spatial Mapping of Search Engine Results M.s Thesis Proposal

With the explosive growth of the available information on the internet, navigating the web successfully in order to obtain the desired information has become an important issue. This essentially involves using techniques such as searching for the desired information using keyword searches and subject based searches, among other techniques. To the best of our knowledge, most tools which achieve this goal are not designed to nd the geographic location of this information source. In many applications such information could prove to be extremely useful. Our work focuses on the problem of nding 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 3]. The main contribution of this thesis 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 engine or the number of relevant pages retrieved from a website.