How do location-based services hit Google?

Location-based services (LBS) have triggered a tremendous interest in both industry and academy. The interest can be measured by the number of hits using, for instance, Google search engine. The number returned from Google indicates the amount of web documents available on the Internet. Since only about 20% of online documents are indexed by search engines, the actual number of documents related to a particular search subject should be much higher than the number of hits returned. Nevertheless, if we key ''geographic information systems'' and ''location-based services'' into Google, it reports about 834,000 and 48,200 related documents, respectively (dated on August 15, 2005). We tried to avoid using their abbreviations GIS and LBS, whose hits would be much higher, as both abbreviations could represent something else. For instance, GIS could stand for Gen Mills Inc. or LBS for London Business School. There are many LBS related terms. The relevant terms can be grouped into two major categories: those emerged from IT and those from geospatial information science. For the first group, telematics, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, context aware computing and location aware computing are often used terms, whereas the second group includes location-based services and geographic information services. There has been growing convergence and intersection of IT and geospatial communities, so some terms were suggested by geospatial scientists, e.g. telegeoinformatics and ubiquitous GIS. We used the general Google (www.google.com) for the number of search hits or the related documents about a certain term, and a specialised Google (scholar.google.com) for that of more scientific documents. To some extent, the documents from the two search engines could overlap, and the exact number of documents or hits may not truly reflect the situation in reality, as there are plenty of printed documents that have not been put online yet. However, our primary interest is NOT in the absolute number, but rather on how the number varies from one term to another, from one category to another, or from the Web Google to the Scholar Google search engine. The variations could be a good indicator for the current development of LBS from various perspectives. From Table 1, we can observe that LBS related topics in IT community are much more popular than in geospatial community. Among others, telematics, ubiquitous computing and pervasive computing are the most popular terms. Not to our surprise, Google hits for individual terms are much higher than Scholar hits, as …