Geo-search - the future of web search

Creating the "annotated planet"

Search engines have become an everyday necessity to deal with the sheer volume of content available today. While indexing and searching the documents' text content has been useful in determining what people are looking for, text is typically a very poor means of representing and identifying where information. The web may be world-wide but people are often only interested in looking at documents that pertain to their vicinity.

To address this issue the practice of associating "geo-data" with documents is rapidly gaining momentum. Organisation's like NASA's Global Change Master Directory project have gathered large bodies of geo-tagged content so that scientists from around the world are able to search for specific study types in specific locations. The documents contain a mix of free-text and precise latitude/longitude coordinates defining the area studies were made.

As more content is geo-tagged in this way we can look forward to more powerful and precise search capabilities. Maps can be used to not only visualise search results but also to precisely define the area of interest. The recent availability of free mapping resources (ArcWeb, Google Maps, Google Earth, MS Virtual Earth, Yahoo maps) has done much to stimulate interest in making geo-tagged data available.

SearchArea is a powerful engine specifically designed to meet the challenge of searching geo-tagged content using industry standards and integrating with available mapping solutions.