Geolocation sounds like a high-fluting complex term, but it's not, it's just short for "Geographic location" and now that's explained, it's probably obvious what it is about.

Simply put, its away of tying electronic things to physical locations, in the case of this article, a web page. Geolocation has promised to be the "next big thing" for a while, it is the first step in the process to allow the Internet to answer geographic questions, such as "where is my nearest karaoke?", "where can I buy a kebab near the Rack-and-Tenter pub" and "where is the nearest place for a hang-over remedy".

Another example of using it would be with a PDA that has GPS and an internet connection, wherever some was, they could whip open the PDA and via a search engine, see webpages around them, which would be really cool, even if they just wanted to do something simple, like find a nice restaurant near them when on holiday.

I give a webpage a location is quite simple, but a little bit techie, you just need to store the latitude and longitude relevant to the content of each page of your site, in the "header section" of the code of each page of your site.

For example if the decimal notation of a business's latitude was 51.424420 and the longitude was -0.070417 the code would be :-

<meta id="ICBM" content="51.424420,-0.070417" />
<meta id="DC.title" content="Neil's Karaoke" />
<meta id="geo.position" content="51.424420;-0.070417" />

For personal websites and websites of businesses run from home, privacy is a concern, a simple way around it is to chose the co-ordinates of a local landmark close enough to give a rough idea of the location but not enough to go knocking on the door.

Though this is the future are there any search engines using geo-location now ?

Yes, there are a few, currently the most famous is a2b another, pre-dated a2b, is
Geotags

How can I find my latitude and longitude?

One way is to use a GPS unit

Another is to ask a mapping webpage, for example with streetmap.co.uk, you type in your postcode, which will show you a map of where you are, then at the bottom of the page, there is a link which says "Click here to convert/measure coordinates" which will take you to a page which will show you your latitude and longitude.

There must be ways for search engines to find out roughly where my webpage’s are without me going to all this bother?

Well, yes and no, search engines like Google, know roughly where in the world you are, by looking up the gateways the data between you and them is travelling through. They then check through their own data for the physical location of each gateway. This method falls down when the data travel through a gateway Google knows nothing about, like a private companies network for example. Another technique is to look for postal addresses on websites, though at the time of writing companies are choosing just to focus on American address’s.

Are then any geo-location systems not using the standard methods you refered to earlier

Well unfortunatly yes,there is the NAC system by "Travel GIS" there system uses a meta tag like this <meta id="NAC" content="GZTF4 RK38Q"> and to get the location for your site you have no choice but to go to them (and if you want more than one of them at a time they will charge you). It would be easy to say "there not using standards so let's ignore them" but then it is at the time of writing the "standard" being used by Microsoft for its mappoint service.