Location, postal style

While search engine companies struggle to provide effective geographical search methods, the BBC news service points to a simple and effective trick for identifying sites around you: search for your postal code.

In America, the results tend to be less significant. Using only the 5 digit zip code, there tends to be a lot of noise from the fact that many other things tend to share the first 100,000 integers on the web. Extending the zip code to include the 4 digit extension specifies the search enough, but given that the extension is optional, misses lots of results.

Since the extra 4 is geographically based, I subtracted and added within a range of 20 for my home address and received quite a few results, but since Google and other search engines do not support regular expressions or partial search queries, this is a painstaking process.

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