Microsoft hopes to make the rapidly growing flood of information online more user-friendly and accessible with its new personalized search engine, Emporia.
A five-person team of Microsoft scientists has been working in Cambridge on an intelligent search engine able to learn and provide search results based on individual needs. Ralf Herbrich, a Microsoft manager, recently updated attendees at the Next11 conference in Berlin, even bringing along a prototype.
To tell whether an item is relevant for a user, the Emporia project also analyses data from posts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Knowledge and concrete experience from these networks is growing ever more important, says Herbrich.
A first prototype of Project Emporia is ready for mobile use on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and is already one of the top 10 apps on Microsoft’s Marketplace.
Emporia analyses news streams, searching for keywords and key categories and filtering for interesting stories. Users can further refine an initial list of hits by following certain people or websites.
Personalized appraisal, combined with cross-referencing personal data, will generally result in even better hit lists that are ever more relevant to an individual’s personal interests.
