Quantitative identification of the information pattern for tourist attractions in the internet space: A case study in Beijing, China

The research on Geography of Information Society concerns about the impact of information on space. The various information patterns of the spatial features emerged in the internet are important evidences that information impacts greatly on the field of space, and quantitative identification of these patterns is an important way of recognizing the depth of the effecting. Selecting 154 tourist attractions of different types as the sample cases which are located in Beijing and evaluated as “A” grade scenic points by the National Tourism Administration of China, The authors describe the information pattern of tourist attractions in the internet space by the way of counting the mean page searching quantities based on the key words of these tourist attractions in different internet spaces such as tourist websites, Blog, Stick-bar and so on, using the Baidu search engine, or ranking their portals websites by Alexa web site. The result indicates that information quantities decrease from high to low according to the “A” grade, and the difference is prominent especially between “5A” and “4A” grade scenic points. However the ranking of portals websites is inconsistent with the information quantities sequence of key words searching, and the ranking of “3A” and “2A” grade surpasses the “4A” grade. The internet information patterns also show evident difference between four different types of tourist attractions. The cultural sightseeing scenic points have an evident advantage than others in information quantities, while by the comprehensive ranking of the Alexa web site or considering the web page designing of foreign languages the artificial recreation type exceeds cultural sightseeing type obviously. Quantitative identification of internet information patterns between the tourist attractions of different “A” grade or different types provides an import- - ant mode on making full use of internet information, and also introduces a new idea for the quantitative study on Geography of Information Society.