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In a geographical route search, given search terms, the goal is to find an effective route that (1) starts at a given location, (2) ends at a given location, and (3) travels via geographical entities that are relevant to the given terms. A route is effective if it does not exceed a given distance limit whereas the ranking scores of the visited entities, with respect to the search terms, are maximal. This paper introduces route-search queries, suggests three semantics for such queries and deals with the problem of efficiently answering queries under the different semantics. Since the problem of answering route-search queries is a generalization of the traveling salesman problem, it is unlikely to have an efficient solution, i.e., there is no polynomial-time algorithm that solves the problem (unless P=NP). Hence, in this work we consider heuristics for the problem. Methods for effectively computing routes are presented. The methods are …