Characterizing Web Resources for Improved Searching and Browsing Luis Gravano Web resources are extremely diverse, not only along every conceivable topical and non-topical dimension, but also in terms of the access interface that they present to users. Current search engines ignore crucial non-topical dimensions of web resources that could be used to improve the quality of query results.
Geographical relevance is one such dimension.
In effect, web sites containing information on restaurants or apartment rentals, for instance, are relevant primarily to web users in geographical proximity to these locations. In contrast, an on-line newspaper may be relevant to users across the United States. The first part of my talk describes how we can automatically compute the geographical scope of web resources and build improved, geographically-aware search engines. The second part of my talk addresses another limitation of current search engines, namely that they ignore the often valuable contents of search-only text databases available on the web, since crawlers cannot penetrate and index the contents of such databases. I will describe a recent technique to automate the classification of such search-only text databases.