[Geowanking] RE: LazyWeb request

[Philip Abrahamson]

Anselm Hook wrote:

>On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Philip Abrahamson wrote:
>
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>>iii. The engine that finds the information will be a "Nearby Engine" - a
>>cross between a search engine's keyword index, and a spatial proximity
>>index.  It will have a single box for input.
>>    
>>
>
>I heard from the Nokia site that there is something like 200 million SMS
>messages a day - one could easily imagine an equivalent quality of
>geotagged messages per day within a couple of years.
>
> - a
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Google's traditional search engine currently handles 3Billion pages.  
It's just a matter of whether the index can be scaled.  The added 
component to Mobilemaps' Nearby Engine is a pair of space-curve indexes 
for proximity, which likewise scale with a near constant lookup time.  
We only have a little demo of a Nearby Engine at mobilemaps.com, with 
half a million pages, because we're underfunded :-)

Serving the pages is less a problem than the time spent indexing them, 
which can be more challenging depending on resources.  However, the 
beauty of geographic data is that it can be scaled geographically: local 
data is usually sought by local users; so a Nearby Engine can choose to 
index data only in its own geographic area.

Philip Abrahamson
philip at mobilemaps.com
http://www.mobilemaps.com