Custom Local Search

Many popular online services provide “local” or “yellow-pages” search, but none of them allow users to customize the search over user-specified data. Instead, searches are performed over spatial data provided by data aggregators. This paper describes a novel system for providing custom local search over user-provided custom spatial datasets logically combined with detailed street-level vector data. We present the algorithms and architecture underlying our prototype system, which can handle a range of queries, including complex queries with ambiguities and misspellings. We show that the system provides custom local search with precision and recall figures that often exceed that of a commercial local search service. Further, we show that our system scales gracefully with the number of individual custom data sets being served simultaneously.