Efficient location-aware web search

Abstract

Mobile search is quickly becoming the most common mode of search on the internet. This shift is driving changes in user behaviour, and search engine behaviour. Just over half of all search queries from mobile devices have local intent, making locationaware search an increasingly important problem. In this work, we compare the efficiency and effectiveness of two general types of geographical search queries, range queries and k nearest neighbor queries, for common web search tasks. We test state-of-the-art spatial-textual indexing and search algorithms for both query types on two large datasets. Finally, we present a rank-safe dynamic pruning algorithm that is simple to implement and use with ..