>I would like to talk about the location of the person
making the search versus >the location of the product or service
provider
Geographic/Spatial queries are a
well-researched topic in the database literature. Free text retrieval is
definitely a weak approach, though people attempt it by using thesaurus
facilities to represent the structure of a gazetteer. In most of the
practical systems I have seen, spatial query is done using postal codes: the
system needs knowledge of which postal districts are near each other. (We also use such techniques for scheduling the
itinerary of service engineers).
>A hotel room is a 'chambre' in french. If I search for
a hotel room in Italy, I>don't know the word for room in
italian...
Multilingual search is well researched and
seems to work reasonably well. The more difficult problem is to distinguish
agencies that can book you a hotel room from newsletter articles by people
enthusing what a wonderful hotel room they were staying in: I think this is
why there will always be added value in manual categorization and indexing
services.
Mike Kay
