September 27, 2006

What's Cooking in Search Engine Labs

Many of the major search engines showcase the projects they are working on in their respective research labs. Want a peek behind the scenes? Read on in today's SearchDay article, Behind the Scenes in the Search Engine Labs.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 2:25 AM | Permalink

May 4, 2006

Microsoft's Short Hand Search "Wild Thing" & IM Link Sharing "Nocturnal"

TMCnet.com has an interesting article explaining two new projects Microsoft is working on in relation to MSN Search. The first is something named "Wild Thing" that enables short hand searching. It was first designed for mobile Web searching, to allow users to type short hand, but now if you don't know how to spell "Schwarzenegger" you can type "ar* sc*w mo*" into the engine and it will try to figure it out. The second is something named "Nocturnal" and this shares bookmarks and Web browsing activity with your MSN Messenger buddies. Nocturnal can also be used to learn your Web behavior and tailor search results specifically for you.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 3:16 PM | Permalink

April 14, 2006

Microsoft's Search By Camera Phone Research Project

Microsoft's Camera Phone Search Project and Other Camera Phone Search Tech from ResourceShelf covers a new Microsoft Research project allowing you to take pictures of things in order to get search results back about it.

Snap something with your camera phone, then that goes into an image search database, which identifies the object or type of object in order to run other types of searches about it. Or that's the idea. You can't try it yet, and Microsoft isn't even certain what they may do with it.

How about searching by taking pictures of bar codes? Completely different idea than this project, but thanks for asking! The ResourceShelf post gives you resources on the whole Amazon bar code searching in Japan thing, for the curious. And Frucall, mentioned yesterday by Brian, deals with bar code searching as well. The downside is you have to key in the numbers.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 7:31 AM | Permalink

April 13, 2006

Euro Conference On IR Recapped

What? You didn't make the European Conference on Information Retrieval in London this week? Don't fret. Xan Porter did and has a rundown here, with one interesting paper from Microsoft Research on how key terms appearing in a URL can be used to predict if a page has a good answer. It's something MSN plans test more on "real" web data from MSN in the future. I suspect the method might not be so useful then. Indeed, MSN Search's quality already seems to struggle with the old school search engine method of favoring URLs with search terms in them, an easy thing to manipulate. I can't find a free link to the actual paper. If one turns up, we'll postscript.

Postscript: Reader Dean Rowan writes that you'll find the Microsoft paper here (PDF format). However, it's only accessible to those with SpringerLink subscriptions.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:30 AM | Permalink

August 26, 2005

Research from Microsoft: Personalized Search, Determining a Query's Dominant Location, and Much More

The other day I posted about a paper presented at the SIGIR conference a few week's ago. Apparently, that got Findory CEO, Greg Linden, looking for other papers from the conference. Well, he found, "Personalized Search via Automated Analysis of Interests and Activities" from Microsoft Research. Greg shares a few thoughts about it in this GWG blog post.

Another paper and a very interesting read from Microsoft Research (also presented at the SIGIR conference), is titled: Detecting Dominant Locations from Search Queries (PDF). This Search-Science blog post provides a summary.

Want More? Here's a selected list of other search-related research papers that MSR presented at SIGIR. The links will take you to an abstract where you'll also find access to the full text.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:16 PM | Permalink

July 28, 2005

Yahoo Hiring From IBM

We don't need no stinkin' Microsoft execs like Google, says Yahoo. We'll rob IBM! Yahoo Is Wooing I.B.M. Technical Talent from the New York Times looks at how Yahoo just picked up Prabhakar Raghavan, formerly of the much cited Clever project (and part of the foundation for Teoma), as head of research. He's not directly from IBM but comes to Yahoo via Verity. But another direct IBM hire has happened and Yahoo says more are in the works. This follows on Yahoo recently opening a new research lab at UC Berkeley, though they did lose their former Yahoo Labs head to Microsoft in April. Google, meanwhile, prefers to raid Bell Labs. See From Bell Labs To Google Labs for that.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:30 AM | Permalink

July 20, 2005

MSN Updates Start.com Site with New Features

Yesterday, MSN's experimental Start.com customizable homepage received a few updates and bug fixes that you can read about on the Start.com blog.

The most noticeable change comes in the way search results are displayed. Start.com results pages now allow you to quickly move between web results, news results, and RSS results via tab links at the top of the page. RSS results come from feed directory that's powered by Moreover and also used at My MSN.. Also, Start.com now allows you to subscribe to feeds via a link next to each RSS result.

Ok, MSN has a searchable directory of RSS feeds. However, you've got to think that it will be sooner rather than later when MS releases their own fully functioning and standalone RSS engine. We've mentioned that MSN was developing an RSS engine a couple of times on SEW. Once, last November in Chris's original review of MSN Search and again a few weeks later in a blog post by Danny.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:01 PM | Permalink

June 30, 2005

Behind the Scenes at the Major Engines

All of the major search engines, to one degree or another, provide insights into what they're working on in their research and development labs. The quality and quantity of what's shared varies widely, but you can get a good sense of what to expect in the future by spending some time with what's available. Today's SearchDay article, What's Cooking in Search Engine Labs shows you where to find the best sources of inside information, both official and unofficial.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 10:28 AM | Permalink

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