1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to searching the Internet. More specifically, the present invention is related to improving searches on the web by inserting searchable spatial keys into map images.
2. Description of the Related Art
Although search engines on the Internet are used to locate content from all over the world, they are not particularly useful for doing local searching. For example, a search engine will not produce very good results for the search query “house for sale within 3 miles of 1 Market Street, San Francisco, Calif.”. Some search engine providers have started maintaining local databases that include the locations of local businesses or other points of interest, thus enabling searches such as “Starbucks near 94114”. However, this local search is expensive for search engines, because spatial indexing and searching requires the search provider to integrate new technology into both their index builder and search algorithm. To perform an accurate local search using traditional search engine technology, addresses must be scraped from websites, and geocoded to a latitude and longitude as part of the index-building process. Geocoding is error prone, slow, and expensive. Further, addresses are difficult to identify in web pages, and address formats are notoriously given in non-standard ways. Alternatively, some services like Yahoo! Yellow Pages use a geocoded-yellow pages database. Such databases are expensive, and require periodic updating—thus they are not a spatial search of the web, but are simply a spatial search of the Yellow Pages, a vastly smaller data set.
Accordingly, there is a need for a web searching technology that enables highly precise local web searching with minimal integration costs on the part of the search provider