Imagine, says Mr Jorgensen at Microsoft, that you are going to the theatre: you will probably want to find other things nearby, like a place to park and a restaurant, so it makes sense to search by location. “Sometimes, to go to a place and find all the information associated with it is easier than regular search,” he says. Advertisers might well pay a premium to reach internet users who are looking for things with that level of geographic specificity.
All of this works, however, only if information on the web is indexed geographically. That means adding machine-readable “tags” to documents to indicate the location to which they refer: think of it like sticking Post-it notes on to web documents, says Mr Liebhold – labelling information so it can be sorted and found in a different way.
