Geo Viser. Geographic visualization of search engine results

Abstract

Successful navigation of the web for relevant information is facilitated by keyword and subject based search tools. To the best of our knowledge, most tools which achieve this goal are not designed to find the geographic location of information sources. In many instances such information could prove to be extremely useful to answer queries with certain geo-spatial elements. The main contribution of this paper 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. Current search engines ignore the existence of such geographic meta-data and therefore are unable to process queries which are inherently geo-spatial in nature. Our system (Geo Viser) integrates this functionality to supplement the current capabilities of a search engine.