Detecting Geographical Serving Area of Web Resources

Most human activities occur around where the user is physically located. Knowing the geographical serving area of web resources, therefore, is very important for many web applications. Here serving area stands for the geographical distribution of online users who are interested in a given web site. It can be also seen as the geographical area that this web site intends to reach. For example, the serving area of a restaurant site is usually restricted to a town or city, while the serving area of an airport site can be as large as a state. In this paper, we proposed a set of novel methods to detect the serving area of web resources by analyzing search engine logs, our example of web usage data. We use the search logs to detect serving area in two ways. First, we extracted the user IP locations to generate the geographical distribution of users who had the same interests in a web site. Second, query terms input by users were considered as the user knowledge about a web site. From the experimental results, we found that the approach based on query terms was superior to that based on IP locations, since search queries for local sites tended to include location words while the IP locations were sometimes erroneous.