Abstract:

It is often useful when doing an internet search to get results based on our current location. For example, we might want such results when we search on Eating Joints, Car Service Center, or Hospitals. Current open source search engines like those based on Nutch do not provide this facility. Commercial engines like Google and Yahoo provide this facility so it would be useful to incorporate it in a open source alternative. Complete raw data dumps for determining geo location of IP addresses can be found from hostip.info. Similarly, openstreetmap.org allows complete Earth downloads of street map data. The goal of my project is to use these public data sources and extend Yioop to return location-based search results. The hostip.info data set can be used to geolocate the ipaddress from a given search query. These geolocations will then be used to parse out the relevant information based on the given geographical location, and return the relevant local search results. We will be extending the archive iterator from Yioop so it can be used to crawl the planet.osm archives. Once we have the crawled data, an algorithm that ranks search results on the basis of distance will be used to rank results nearest to the geolocation of search query. The last part of the project includes plotting this ranked data on a map by rendering the abstract data onto tiles to produce a concrete map.

CS297 Results

• Performed a simple web crawl using Yioop to understand its inner workings
• Created a simple app to return geolocation from a given ipaddress. This deliverable helped me understand the database schema of the hostip database.
• Created an app to extract records based on a keyword from Xml formatted planet.osm file.
• CS297 Report.

Proposed Schedule

Key Deliverables:

• Software
  • Deliverable 1 due:Plot the ipaddress from the search query onto the map using a rendering software.
  • Deliverable 2 due:Use archive iterator and get the location from planet.osm based on the geolocation from search query.
  • Deliverable 3 due:Devise an algorithm to determine search results nearest to user based on the distance of how near it is from the user performing a search.
  • Deliverable 4 due:Plot the final results on map.
• Report
  • CS 298 Report

Innovations and Challenges

• Deliverable 2 is challenging as it requires getting a successful crawl of the planet.osm archives so it can be used to retrieve local geographical results.
• Deliverable 3 is challenging as it requires extensive research and coming up with an effective algorithm to rank search results.

References:

[Wiki2011]Planet osm-Wikipedia. Retreived April 6,2011 from Wikipedia web page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm

[WISE2000]Yates,J.D and Xiaofang Zhou.Searching the web using the map. Retrieved from Proceedings of first International Conferance on Web Information Systems Engineering.19-June 2000.

[DEXA2010]Stefan Dlugolinsky and Michal Laclavik and Ladislav Hluchy (2010).Towards a search system for the web exploiting spatial data of a web document.