Results in geographically aware search engine technology

A two year long, European Union backed project, came to fruition in April with the release of the geographically aware search engine.

The geographically aware search engine combines, aside from location information, intelligent generation of suggestions based on the geographical information from queries. The recall of results was also increased using geographical knowledge.

The demonstration uses interfaces for navigation and displaying image results geographically via Google maps. Additionally a brand new interface was introduced which enabled the displaying of geographically and topically clustered result sets.

The user-test panel found that the developed features added much value to the search experience, among them new interfaces for navigating and restricting results. Picsearch will be investigation how a full scale search engine can benefit from the findings of the project.

The project was funded by Eurostars, via Vinnova in Sweden, and developed Spatial Ontology Language for Multimedia Information Modeling (Solim), an extension to Web Ontology Language (OWL). In all four different companies from five different countries were involved in the European Union project. The list of participating companies, apart from Picsearch, was Semlab, AGMLab and Tilde.