Mapping Web Pages by Internet Protocol (IP) addresses: Analyzing Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Web Search Engine Results
This research addresses the need for more accurate geolocation data in fields like web analytics and digital humanities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with manual verification.
The study tackled the problem of verifying the accuracy of IP address geolocation for web pages by manually comparing IP-based locations with actual addresses from content creators, finding discrepancies that highlight reliability issues in existing databases. It introduced a cartographic design method using kernel density maps to visualize spatial patterns of web search results across categories like 'Blog' and 'News'.
Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are frequently used as a method of locating web users by researchers in several different fields. However, there are competing reports concerning the accuracy of those locations, and little research has been done in manually comparing the IP geolocation databases and web page geographic information. This paper categorized web page from the Yahoo search engine into twelve categories, ranging from 'Blog' and 'News' to 'Education' and 'Governmental'. Then we manually compared the mailing or street address of the web page's content creator with the geolocation results by the given IP address. We introduced a cartographic design method by creating kernel density maps for visualizing the information landscape of web pages associated with specific keywords.