Fwix Introduces GeoTagger: "Our Goal Is To Index The Web By Location"

Location is the new black, but why do mobile apps need to have all the fun? Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Today, Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi.

With one line of Javascript through its new GeoTagger API, partner sites will be able to geotag their web pages. What that means is that Fwix will index the site and extract any places it finds.  The first partner to roll this out will be NBC’s local sites such as NBC New York and NBC Bay Area.  A Geotagger button on the page, which could be labeled “Places on this page,” will then create a places widget when someone clicks and hovers over it.  It will show the names, addresses, and each place on a map.

GeoTagger shows all the places mentioned on the page without any tagging or other wok required by the publisher.  It is all automatic.  Fwix has expertise in this kind of geo-content analysis because it started out as a hyperlocal news aggregator before it switched gears.  Now its ambition is much bigger: to geo-index the web and expose the location data buried in everyday web pages.

How useful will this be?  It depends on the site.  But as the web becomes more mobile, that kind of feature is something mobile users will definitely want to see.