Framework for location-aware search engine

Abstract

Nowadays, a large part of the multimedia data on the Internet is generated with devices that automatically annotate them with location information However, free-form content on websites does not implicitly contain any geographical information. This is the biggest challenge for building a location-aware search engine. In this paper, we study how to extract location-aware information from the web. The key challenges are to detect location from a web page and to extract relevant information related to that location. We detect locations by identifying postal addresses using freely available gazetteers. Additional information for summarising the search results are titles and representative images, which we mine from the content using simple rule-based approaches utilising the structure of web pages. This information can be used to personalise search results for mobile users so that the results are relevant to their location.