Abstract: A system and method for crawling Web content. First a set of geographic locations is defined. A portion of the set of geographic locations is assigned to a first crawling node. A second portion of the set of geographic locations is assigned to as second crawling node. The first and second crawling nodes then crawl Web content. For each Web page that is located by the first and second crawling nodes a determination is made as to whether the Web page contains a geographic location that belongs the set of geographic locations. If it is determined that the a Web page that is located by either the first or second crawling node does belong to the set of geographic locations, then that Web page is referred to the crawling node to which that geographic location is assigned.

Abstract: A system and method for ranking Web content comprising Web pages or portions of Web pages containing a geographical entity are described. The system includes a data structure that comprises a graph representing the Web content. The graph includes a plurality of page nodes, wherein each page node represents one of the Web pages, a plurality of geographic nodes, wherein each geographic node represents one of the geographic entities, a plurality of directed page edges, wherein each directed page edge represents a directed link between a pair of Web pages, and a plurality of directed geographic edges, wherein each directed geographic edge represents a directed link between one geographic entity and one Web page. The system further includes a ranking module for ranking the Web content based on at least a portion of the plurality of directed page edges and a portion of the plurality of directed geographic edges.