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MS Patent Applications Reveal Search Technology
eldavojohn writes, "In the roughly 90 patents they applied for on November 2, 2006, Microsoft reveals that it is apparently pushing its research in the search engine market. There are a few patents that reveal improved ranking methods and document classification but the real interesting ones revolve around linking related queries, optimizing search, identifying results that are spam, and using a Bayesian classifier to measure feedback from the user. If that's not enough, there's even a few I don't quite understand. Another notable Microsoft application for a patent is the model for assisting children in authoring stories so you can't accuse Microsoft of not thinking of the children. Microsoft regularly applies for many patents but never so many revolving around search."
That hyperlink that has "understand" as anchor text has NOTHING to do with searches, it's a database related patent (being from MS, we can safely assume it's a SQL Server related patent).
And being on topic: everybody out there is already logging you, from your ISP, big brother, search engines, advertising sites/outlets, your various cards that give points at stores, you name it, you're being tracked. This is hardly worse. It's not like someone's going to sit there and manually check what you've clicked onto (they have no real reason to do that either, if anything search terms would be "incriminating enough" if it came down to that). If it gives significantly better results for common search terms (by showing those results nobody seemingly cared about lower), then why not? I think it's a pretty good idea, we'll see if the implementation lives up to it.
I use it, although in all honesty, it's about the same as Google search for me. Results are good enough that I'm happy. However, I do like Live Image Search far more than Google Image Search. Live Image search has infinite scroll (no more clicking Next), the images are more relevant in my experience (try "Al Gore" on Live and Google), and it lists related people. It also has my favorite feature: you can add images you've found to a scratchpad. This is quite useful if you want to gather images while searching.
actually, google sometimes changes the result URLs to redirects like "google.com/redir?url=http://example.com" (not just like that, but you get the idea).
then their server is set up to send an HTTP redirect message to your browser whenever you click on that link - you get to the page and don't even notice that your click was logged
yahoo does this all the time (and for whatever reason they redirect between their internal sites multiple times - a redirect inside another redirect.. *shrug*)
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?