A Tale of Two (Similar) Cities: Inferring City Similarity Through Geo-Spatial Query Log Analysis
Venue
Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval (2011)
Publication Year
2011
Authors
Rohan Seth, Michele Covell, Deepak Ravichandran, D. Sivakumar, Shumeet Baluja
BibTeX
Abstract
Understanding the backgrounds and interest of the people who are consuming a piece
of content, such as a news story, video, or music, is vital for the content
producer as well the advertisers who rely on the content to provide a channel on
which to advertise. We extend traditional search-engine query log analysis, which
has primarily concentrated on analyzing either single or small groups of queries or
users, to examining the complete query stream of very large groups of users – the
inhabitants of 13,377 cities across the United States. Query logs can be a good
representation of the interests of the city’s inhabitants and a useful
characterization of the city itself. Further, we demonstrate how query logs can be
effectively used to gather city-level statistics sufficient for providing insights
into the similarities and differences between cities. Cities that are found to be
similar through the use of query analysis correspond well to the similar cities as
determined through other large-scale and time-consuming direct measurement studies,
such as those undertaken by the Census Bureau.
