  The prosperity of location-based social networking services enables
geo-social group queries for group-based activity planning and marketing. This
paper proposes a new family of geo-social group queries with minimum
acquaintance constraint (GSGQs), which are more appealing than existing
geo-social group queries in terms of producing a cohesive group that guarantees
the worst-case acquaintance level. GSGQs, also specified with various spatial
constraints, are more complex than conventional spatial queries; particularly,
those with a strict $k$NN spatial constraint are proved to be NP-hard. For
efficient processing of general GSGQ queries on large location-based social
networks, we devise two social-aware index structures, namely SaR-tree and
SaR*-tree. The latter features a novel clustering technique that considers both
spatial and social factors. Based on SaR-tree and SaR*-tree, efficient
algorithms are developed to process various GSGQs. Extensive experiments on
real-world Gowalla and Dianping datasets show that our proposed methods
substantially outperform the baseline algorithms based on R-tree.
