Along with news of Microsoft’s Updated Live Search Engine, discussed at Microsoft’s Searchification Day, comes some other news from the Live.com camp.
One of the founders of the Microsoft Search Labs (a research and development group within the Windows Live Search team), Erik Selberg, is leaving Microsoft to join Amazon.com.
With my last post on how closely Yahoo is treating categories, I wanted to make sure I pointed out this Microsoft patent application from Erik Selberg on categorization (I wrote about it in a post titled Microsoft Looks at Category Based Link Weights):
He has at least a couple of other Microsoft patent applications with his name on them:
- Time-anchored posterior indexing of speech
- System and method for optimization of results based on monetization intent
Best wishes to Dr. Selberg on his move to Amazon.
The news about Microsoft Live’s updated search engine is intriguing. Here is some of what they tell us that we should, and will be seeing in the future:
- Over fourfold increase in index size
- Substantial improvements in understanding query intent
- Significant enhancements to core algorithms. (more user click-stream data to inform ranking and relevancy processes)
- Increased focus on query refinement
- New Web data extraction model
- Expansion of Rich Answers (more non-web search results integrated into search results pages, such as images and news)
Microsoft has been publishing a lot of patent applications and papers that cover many of these areas. It will be interesting to see if any of them have been incorporated into this newest version of Live search.