Geographic ranking for a local search engine

Traditional ranking schemes of the relevance of a Web page to a user query in a search engine are less appropriate when the search term contains geographic information. Often, geographic entities, such as addresses, city names, and location names, appear only once or twice in a Web page, and are typically not in a heading or larger font. Consequently, an alternative ranking approach to the traditional weighted tf*idf relevance ranking is need. Further, if a Web site contains a geographic entity, it is often the case that its in- and out-neighbours do not refer to the same entity, although they may refer to other geographic entities. We present a local search engine that applies a novel ranking algorithm suitable for ranking Web pages with geographic content. We describe its major components: geographic ranking, focused crawling, geographic extractor, and the related web-sites feature.