Many information resources on the web are relevant primarily 
to limited geographical communities. 
For instance, web sites containing information on restaurants, 
theaters, and apartment rentals are relevant primarily 
to web users in geographical proximity to these locations.
In contrast, other information resources are relevant 
to a broader geographical community. 
For instance, an on-line newspaper may be relevant to users 
across the United States. Unfortunately, the geographical 
scope of web resources is largely ignored by web search engines. 
We make the case for identifying and exploiting the geographical 
location information of web sites so that web search engines 
can rank resources in a geographically sensitive fashion, 
in addition to using more traditional information-retrieval strategies. 
In this paper, we first consider how to compute the geographical 
location of web pages. Subsequently, we consider how to exploit
such information in one specific "proof-of-concept" application 
we implemented in JAVA, and discuss other examples as well.