Publications

A new search algorithm looks for connections between people.

As part of its efforts to better compete with Google, Microsoft is plumbing the connections between searchers and their contacts to produce better results.

Microsoft researchers are exploring whether using data from several members of a social group--a technique that the company calls "groupization"--can improve search results. Their initial findings, based on experiments involving around 100 participating Microsoft employees, suggest that tapping into different types of groups could produce significantly better search results.

The team has developed an algorithm that, on average, pinpoints at least one search result for all members of a group that they judge to be better than the results returned using conventional algorithms. The results will be presented at the Web Search and Data Mining Conference in Barcelona in mid-February.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22040/