How do location-based services hit Google?

摘要

Location-based services (LBS) have triggered a tremendous interest in both industry and academy. The interest can be measured by the number of hits using, for instance, Google search engine. The number returned from Google indicates the amount of web documents available on the Internet. Since only about 20% of online documents are indexed by search engines, the actual number of documents related to a particular search subject should be much higher than the number of hits returned. Nevertheless, if we key "geographic information systems" and "location-based services" into Google, it reports about 834,000 and 48,200 related documents, respectively (dated on August 15, 2005). We tried to avoid using their abbreviations GIS and LBS, whose hits would be much higher, as both abbreviations could represent something else. For instance, GIS could stand for Gen Mills Inc. or LBS for London Business School.