Geographically-Sensitive Link Analysis

Many web pages and resources are primarily relevant to certain geographic locations. For example, in many queries web pages on restaurants, hotels, or movie theaters are mostly relevant to those users who are in geographic proximity to these locations. Moreover, as the number of queries with a local component increases, searching for web pages which are relevant to geographic locations is becoming increasingly important. The performance of geographically-oriented search is greatly affected by how we use geographic information to rank web pages. In this paper, we study the issue of ranking web pages using geographically-sensitive link analysis algorithms. More precisely, we study the question of whether geographic information can improve search performance. We propose several geographically-sensitive link analysis algorithms which exploit the geographic linkage between pages. We empirically analyze the performance of our algorithms.