Spatial Variation in Search Engine Results

Geographic information retrieval (GIR) is, as a branch of traditional information retrieval, a discipline that tries to enrich data with geographical information to make it suitable for indexing and retrieval. Local or geographic aspects of web information retrieval should thus not be omitted but used to refine ranking algorithms and display more locally-relevant results to the users. This article is a conceptual approach of how queries can be treated differently regarding their geographic focus or spread. For that purpose, the geographical distribution of various search engine results is analyzed and classified into different patterns. A model to effectively compute geographical concentration/dispersion is developed and the inclusion of a map into search engine result pages is discussed. The searches conducted were restricted to German pages as site owners are per law obliged to publish address information.