System and method for geographically organizing and classifying businesses on the world-wide web

Abstract

A method and search engine for classifying a source publishing a document on a portion of a network, includes steps of electronically receiving a document, based on the document, determining a source which published the document, and assigning a code to the document based on whether data associated with the document published by the source matches with data contained in a database. An intelligent geographic- and business topic-specific resource discovery system facilitates local commerce on the World-Wide Web and also reduces search time by accurately isolating information for end-users. Distinguishing and classifying business pages on the Web by business categories using Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes is achieved through an automatic iterative process.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.