>I would like to talk about the location of the person making the search versus >the location of the product or service provider

 

Geographic/Spatial queries are a well-researched topic in the database literature. Free text retrieval is definitely a weak approach, though people attempt it by using thesaurus facilities to represent the structure of a gazetteer. In most of the practical systems I have seen, spatial query is done using postal codes: the system needs knowledge of which postal districts are near each other. (We also use such techniques for scheduling the itinerary of service engineers).

 

>A hotel room is a 'chambre' in french. If I search for a hotel room in Italy, I>don't know the word for room in italian...

 

Multilingual search is well researched and seems to work reasonably well. The more difficult problem is to distinguish agencies that can book you a hotel room from newsletter articles by people enthusing what a wonderful hotel room they were staying in: I think this is why there will always be added value in manual categorization and indexing services.

 

Mike Kay