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Spatial variation in search engine queries

Published: 21 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Local aspects of Web search - associating Web content and queries with geography - is a topic of growing interest. However, the underlying question of how spatial variation is manifested in search queries is still not well understood. Here we develop a probabilistic framework for quantifying such spatial variation; on complete Yahoo! query logs, we find that our model is able to localize large classes of queries to within a few miles of their natural centers based only on the distribution of activity for the query. Our model provides not only an estimate of a query's geographic center, but also a measure of its spatial dispersion, indicating whether it has highly local interest or broader regional or national appeal. We also show how variations on our model can track geographically shifting topics over time, annotate a map with each location's "distinctive queries", and delineate the "spheres of influence" for competing queries in the same general domain.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '08: Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
    April 2008
    1326 pages
    ISBN:9781605580852
    DOI:10.1145/1367497
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 21 April 2008

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    1. geolocation
    2. web search

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