Large-Scale Location Prediction for Web Pages

Location information of Web pages plays an important role in location-sensitive tasks such as Web search ranking for location-sensitive queries. However, such information is usually ambiguous, incomplete, or even missing, which raises the problem of location prediction for Web pages. Meanwhile, Web pages are massive and often noisy, which pose challenges to the majority of existing algorithms for location prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel and scalable location prediction framework for Web pages based on the query-URL click graph. In particular, we introduce a concept of term location vectors to capture location distributions for all terms and develop an automatic approach to learn the importance of each term location vector for location prediction. Empirical results on a large URL set demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the location prediction accuracy comparing with various representative baselines. We further provide a principled way to incorporate the proposed framework into the search ranking task and experimental results on a commercial search engine show that the proposed method remarkably boosts the ranking performance for location-sensitive queries.