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.
BBC: Web reveals hidden lives
Google: Sites around the Media Lab
what do you think of this?
Geo Tag Elements:
http://geotags.com/geo/geotags2.html
Geo Tags:
http://geotags.com
it would be great if HTML authoring tools put this sort of thing in automatically. the results that i’m getting are pretty sporadic.. not one “cameron” found in the entire united states!
oh well. i guess i’m not that popular in the geotag community.