A system and method for location-specific searching. The invention
correctly identifies explicit and implicit locations in a search query,
and provides an appropriate dominant location. Top search results are
obtained and analyzed to determine which terms in the query often appear
in combination, and the query is tokenized based on the analysis. An
explicit location indicating a location intent is most likely treated as
an individual token, and the explicit location is treated as the dominant
location of the query. In the case of a false positive, wherein the
explicit location in a query is not the location intent, the explicit
location is likely to be present with other terms that provide context. A
token will likely include these terms together. The explicit location
will therefore not be used to generate location-specific results in the
case of a false positive.