A large-scale study on map search logs

Map search engines, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft Live Maps, allow users to explicitly specify a target geographic location, either in keywords or on the map, and to search businesses, people, and other information of that location. In this article, we report a first study on a million-entry map search log. We identify three key attributes of a map search record—the keyword query, the target location and the user location, and examine the characteristics of these three dimensions separately as well as the associations between them. Comparing our results with those previously reported on logs of general search engines and mobile search engines, including those for geographic queries, we discover the following unique features of map search: (1) People use longer queries and modify queries more frequently in a session than in general search and mobile search; People view fewer result pages per query than in general search; (2) The popular query topics in map search are different from those in general search and mobile search; (3) The target locations in a session change within 50 kilometers for almost 80% of the sessions; (4) Queries, search target locations and user locations (both at the city level) all follow the power law distribution; (5) One third of queries are issued for target locations within 50 kilometers from the user locations; (6) The distribution of a query over target locations appears to follow the geographic location of the queried entity.