November 25, 2003

Microsoft is conducting research that could help it in its quest to make search a greater part of its Windows operating system.

The Redmond, Wash., software giant is experimenting with different search technologies that will, among other tasks, conduct Google-like searches on an individual's hard drive or categorize query results in different ways intended to make the data easier to digest.

Microsoft is testing search applications with the goal of making it easier for people to locate documents and other data on their hard drives.

The experimentation may make search a greater part of the Windows operating system, and the results could appear in the forthcoming Longhorn OS. The research could also spell competition for Google.

In many ways, the research seems geared toward finding a user interface for the storage and database functions in Longhorn, a major Windows update expected in 2006.

Implicit Query, an experimental application that was put together a few weeks ago, for example, retrieves links, music files, e-mails and other materials that relate to applications running in the foreground, according to the company.

"We analyze whatever text you are working on and then pull out words that are important and query on those automatically," said Susan Dumais, a senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interactive Group at Microsoft Research. "The idea is to retrieve a bunch of things without you explicitly searching for them."

Microsoft is also looking at integrating these tools directly into operating systems and applications. "I don't want to stop everything I am doing. Bring the search results to me," Dumais said. "People spent a lot of time essentially acting as a file clerk."

Building a search system that links the many incompatible files has long been an elusive goal for Microsoft, and a pet project of Chairman Bill Gates.

With Longhorn, Microsoft intends to finally deliver software that can link the documents, e-mail messages and Web pages that exist in separate, largely incompatible software silos. Longhorn will include an underlying technology called WinFS, derived in part from Microsoft SQL Server, that will allow applications to pull data from a unified database.

Right now, the kind of application dictates how data is stored. Databases are typically used for more numerically oriented applications, such as storing bank account information, while file systems are usually used for document-centric applications with unstructured data types. The problem is that retrieving information from different storage systems is a challenge, at best.

WinFS seeks to bridge the worlds of unstructured documents and data stored in relational databases with a common storage and look-up mechanism. If Microsoft is successful, the net result would likely be greater data interoperability and much improved viewing and searching.

The tools could also permit Microsoft to undermine the utility of commercial search engines such as Google by making its own software the easiest place to initiate an investigation. Spell-checkers, after all, were once independent applications too.

"They don't want to rely on someone else's technology," said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft. "Microsoft's point of view is that it has the right to include pretty much what it wants to in Windows, and they look at search as one of those things people do with computers."

Dumais declined to comment on whether or when the search tools developed by Microsoft Research would be included in shipping products, noting that many of the ideas have just been devised.

Still, some of the work is already being tested fairly extensively. Over 1,000 internal users at Microsoft are already using "Stuff I've Seen," a research project that conducts hard-drive searches, and Dumais' group is conducting interviews with these beta users to determine how people actually use search.

Search, in the Microsoft view, is ubiquitous, but not very efficient. A fairly simple query can generate 20 or more screens of results. The results are also generally not well tailored to an individual's taste or the context of their needs.

"Search in many ways is brute force," Dumais said. "If the two of us type in a query, we get the same thing back, and that is just brain dead. There is no way an intelligent human being would tell us the same thing about the same topic."

Personalization was one of the big buzzwords of the early years of the dot-com era, but many of the efforts to deliver individualized content failed. Software developers, however, are increasingly becoming more adept at using Bayesian models and other probabilistic techniques to insert intelligence into software.

Although the underlying calculation in these models is complex, the overriding concept is fairly simple. Software keeps tabs on an individual's Web surfing habits, interests, acquaintances, work and travel history, work projects, and other data. It also constructs a model that tries to anticipate what a person finds important and what will be irrelevant.

"I have the same meeting every week with the same people. Maybe that isn't so important," Dumais said. "I have a meeting with Bill G. (Gates) He's pretty high on the org chart. Maybe that one is important."

Click here to read the whole story.

        

Read Serge Thibodeau's daily blogs on search engines at Serge Thibodeau Live. We strongly suggest you bookmark our web site by clicking here.

Get your business or company listed in the Global Business Listing directory and increase your business. It takes less then 24 hours to get a premium listing in the most powerful business search engine there is. Click here to find out all about it.

Rank for $ales strongly recommends the use of WordTracker to effectively identify all your right industry keywords. Accurate identification of the right keywords and key phrases used in your industry is the first basic step in any serious search engine optimization program. Click here to start your keyword and key phrase research.

You can link to the Rank for Sales web site as much as you like. Read our section on how your company can participate in our reciprocal link exchange program and increase your rankings in all the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista, Yahoo and all the others.