Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for MSN’s RankNet Technology - In the Works
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In The Works
Like Google and Yahoo, MSN is constantly expanding horizons. It’s not about just search anymore, but its now about what other features are offered along-side search.
AOL Search
MSN has been in talks with AOL and Time Warner since the beginning of this year regarding possible acquisition of the one-time dial-up internet giant. There has been equal talks of acquisition, partnering, or simple co-op, with nothing having been decided as of yet. Joining with AOL would shake up the search engine industry for sure.
Online Book Search
MSN is getting into the business of offering online searches of books and other writings, and says its approach aims to avoid the legal tussles met by rival Google Inc.
The Redmond-based software giant said that it will avoid copyright issues for now by initially focusing mainly on books, academic materials and other publications that are in the public domain. MSN plans to initially work with an industry organization called the Open Content Alliance to let users search about 150,000 published documents. A test version of the product is promised for next year.
Search Clustering
According to MSN’s sandbox site, sandbox.msn.com, which gives an inside look to what is going on in the world of MSN, in development is Search Clustering. “MSRA SRC is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique that was developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. On-the-fly it clusters a search engine's search results into different groups, and provides meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate the user's browsing.
Traditional clustering techniques don't work for this problem because the documents are short, the cluster names should be readable and the algorithm should be efficient for on-the-fly calculation. The method takes on the whole problem in a different way and overcomes the difficulties in traditional clustering methods. It tries to first identify salient topics by identifying distinct and independent keywords, and then classifies the search results into these topics...”
Next: Exclusive MSN Features and MSN Keywords >>
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