MSN has released new information on its forthcoming search technology.
MSN Blogbot & Newsbot
MSN product manager, Karen Redezki told Matt Hicks of eWeek that MSN will be launching a blog and news service to the public before its new algorithmic search engine is released.
The blog search is appears to be receiving a major focus of MSN so you can expect significant innovation in this release. MSN is even holding a Social Computing Symposium which will feature blog technology brainstorming.
MSN’s news search technology coined Newsbot has even broader implications as it appears that MSN will be folding in the first generation of personalization technology. According to a Mercury News article the personalization technology to be included is currently being developed under the name “NewsJunkie” by senior Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Susan Dumais. “Using principles of artificial intelligence and information retrieval, NewsJunkie keeps track of what a reader has already seen. It reorganizes news stories to rank those with the most new information at the top and push those with repetitive information to the bottom, or filter them out entirely.” (writer Kristi Heim, Mercury News)
MSN Answerbot
MSN appears to be close on the heals of AskJeeves with its own version of Jeeve’s natural language processing engine. Normally I would say that this is nothing for Jeeve’s to worry about (considering their vast experience with this technology), however, it appears that the NewsJunkie personalization technology will be integrated into the Answerbot engine. Will this truly affect the results of an inquiry? I am not certain considering that AskJeeves provides extremely relevant results within its current processing engine without the aid of such technology (as far as I know).
In Summary
All in all, it appears that Microsoft is jumping into the personalization game with its characteristically fierce gusto. Will they strike gold with their personalization technology instantly or will there be a ream of familiar technology updates? I know that I am leaning towards the latter, however, the StepForth team will be sure to keep you apprised.