Criteria of query-independent page significance in geospatial web search

Abstract

The ranking problem in geospatial Web search has traditionally been focused towards query dependent relevance, i.e., the combination of textual and geographic similarity of pages with respect to query text and footprint. The query independent relevance which is also known as the popularity or significance of a page is a valuable aspect of generic Web search ranking. But the research progression or the formalization of query independent significance for geospatial Web search has been limited to the basic adaption of general popularity of pages. In this paper, we discuss how several location sensitive properties could alter the significance of geospatial Web pages. We particularly argue the significance of pages with respect to categorical, regional, and granular criterions. We analyze these criterions over a huge geospatial Web graph of different German cities, and perform some small-scale evaluations of our approach. We derive some valuable heuristics on the link structure of geospatial Web that can be used in the ranking formulation, or to cater certain contextual information needs from end-user of a geospatial Web search system.