Geoinformation monitoring of key queries of search engines, and geotagging photos in the North-Caucasian segment of the tourist route ‘Great Silk Road’

Abstract

The Great Silk Road is a transcontinental trade way that has been bridging the East and the West for many ages now. The Great Silk Road nowadays is viewed as a channel for international cooperation in the area of diplomatic relations, culture, science, trade and tourism. In the year of 2017, Russia is launching the Great Silk Road–an interregional tourist route through the North Caucasus. However, due to the lack of official statistical data, it is not possible to evaluate the demand and the tourist traffic at the destinations along the route. One of the possible ways to get the data is to use search engines and social media. This article offers an analysis of the seasonality for the tourist demand regarding the Great Silk Road destinations, which is done through key retrieval queries submitted to the Yandex search system. Photo geotags have been used to identify the age and gender structure of the tourist flow, as well as the geography of the tourist arrivals. The most popular destinations of the North-Caucasian part of the Great Silk Road have been identified.