December 2001 - moved to the htDig indexing agent. Much better indexing of the document content.
I can't find anything; why not?
The search engine is new, and requires special tags on websites. It
cannot index pages until they have been tagged and submitted.
The search index has been preloaded with some demonstration
pages of cities around the world. The following search terms
will generate hits: Europe, Asia, US, London, New York, Boise etc.
plus most country codes - AU, DE, ZA etc.
Some more entries may be seen at
New Pages in Geotags,
and there is a snapshot of keywords in the index
here.
How does the search engine work?
The GeoSearch search engine at GeoTags.com uses
geogaphic HTML tags embedded in Web pages
to locate resources on a map. The geographic position (latitude and longitude)
of the resources are indexed along with keywords from the Web page. Clicking
a position on the map sends (x,y) coordinates to the search engine
which are translated to latitude and longitude and used to sort the search results
and to reject hits outside the displayed area.
I get a lot of red circles at the bottom
of the page. Why is this?
The search engine uses
Style Sheets to place
markup on the map in the correct location. This is much faster
than creating a custom map image for every search.
You must have Style Sheet support enabled
in your browser.
Why is the sea sometimes white ?
Why are there no cities or roads on the map ?
The map is currently generated from coastline data as a black and white
line drawing. Seas are filled in with blue starting at a number of
fixed locations. If the map is zoomed in, there may not be any fill points
on the screen. Future versions may provide a more detailed map.
Are the positions shown on the map accurate ?
The positions shown on your screen may be a few pixels off due
to rounding errors. A higher zoom factor will show the position more
accurately. The positions shown are those on the Web page. There
is no guarantee that these are precise, or even marginally correct.
What are the distances shown ?
The distances shown are calculated as great circle distances from the
last click position to the location of the resource. This is
an "as the crow flies" distance and is given for information only.
Do any other search engines use geographic tags ?
Not yet. If the pilot project is successful, they may. The tags are
intended as an open standard.
I cannot register my page with the search engine; why not ?
Pages must include valid geo tags before they will be indexed. Latitude and Longitude
values must be valid (within the range +/-90 degrees and +/-180 degrees respectively), and
geo.region values, if used, must be valid.
Why do the geographic tags not use
XML/RDF/DC/ISO6709/GML etc. ?
In order to be accepted by HTML authors
the tags must be as simple and unambiguous as possible, and
should be compatible with legacy (non-XML) web pages.
In order to be
processed easily by the search engine, the tags should use
a strictly defined format or list of elements.
While many standards exist, or are in development, for geographic
metadata, they fail to meet one or both of these requirements at the
current time (May 2000).
References:
Will using geographic tags affect how my page looks ?
Will using geographic tags hurt my site ranking in
other search engines ?
No. Providing the tags are well formed (angle brackets and quotation marks
properly nested and closed), HTML META tags are invisible on the page
and are treated independantly by search engines.
Submitting a page to the Search Engine
If your page can sensibly be added (if it refers
to some particular place on the Earths surface):
First, add
geotags to the page. The
GeoTag Generator may be used to
help create the meta tags.
Then, use the
Robot Request page
to submit your page to the robot.
Recently indexed pages should appear in the new page list.
Other Questions
Please address other questions to: