Microsoft's Research division  presented a series of papers at the 2006 Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval conference or SIGIR  which mostly revolved around improving the accuracy of web searches. Sites that rank highly in the SERPs  while serving visitors only ads remain the focus of many papers. (http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/8/8/4916)

One paper entitled   "Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior," forwarded the idea of ranking pages by how users in the community react to many links to sites and not just by how many sites link to them. However, other topics covered feedback relevance, cross-language retrieval, query analysis and classification, summarization, personalization, graph structure analysis, and the development of new machine learning algorithms for search.

More from the Microsoft Research division;
"By examining click-through and browsing patterns across a large number of users, we are able to learn a great deal about how people interact with search technologies and thereby improve our accuracy dramatically." 

Ben Edelman, an activist and researcher  at Harvard University saluted Microsoft stating it's the search engine business model, not the technology, that has to change.
 The work may or may not get its way in to  the public MSN Search engine, but the work would be useful in the future as expected by many. You can read the abstract of papers here.

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