Briefs

By Shari Thurow, September 27, 2006, searchenginewatch.com

Most of the major search engines have research units and live testing grounds for new products and features. What kinds of projects are they currently working on?

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 7-10, 2006, San Jose, CA.

Discussing new and forthcoming developments at the search engine laboratories were panelists James Colburn, Product Manager of adCenter, MSN Search; Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Search at Yahoo; and Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

Microsoft adCenter Labs

According to Colburn, Microsoft's adCenter lab has four areas of focus:

• Paid search
• Contextual ads (including text mining and concept hierarchy)
• Behavioral targeting (including age and gender prediction)
• Emerging markets (for example, video ads)

For example, one tool available at the adLabs site is the context-based acronym resolution tool, which expands abbreviations based on related query words. For example, if you type in the abbreviation "ROI" (without the quotation marks) into this tool, you will find that the most common use for this abbreviation is "region of interest," not "return on investment" as marketers might expect. Likewise, if you type in the abbreviation for the state of California, "CA" (without the quotes), you will find that this abbreviation is most commonly used for the word "cable"

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