| Link | Description |
| Searching to get to the top of Google | Sunday Times article covering how firms are investing in SEO to get to the top of Google (May 08) |
| Classifying web searches | Study by Penn State, showing 80% of searches are informational, the remainder are navigation and transactional (Apr 08) |
| Blended Search Results study | By iProspect. Highlights searchers preferences - never go beyond page 3, blended results are more effective and narrowing into vertical results than starting with vertical searches (Apr 08) |
| How Google searches news | Truths and Myths about how Google indexes and ranks news articles. As always, text matters (Apr 08) |
| First date with the Googlebot | Funny blog post, from Google Webmaster Central, that talks through what Googlebot does when it comes to visit your site (Mar 08) |
| Why data matters | Google blog post about how it all started with PageRank but now there are more than 200 signals being used to influence rank. Some are based on search logs (past user queries). (Mar 08) |
| An Online Organiser That Helps Connect the Dots | NYT article about Twine, a web organiser that automatically tags pages you visit and links related pages (e.g. content with the same people, places, companies...) - semantic search (Feb 08) |
| Social search is the future | VentureBeat interview with Marissa Mayer. Her definition of social search: ¨...any search aided by a social interaction or a social connection.¨ Example of a verbal social search = where shall we go for dinner. Hard to translate online (Jan 08) |
| Enterprise Search Trends for 2008 | Blog post covering article from CMS Watch (Nov 07) |
| Search Engines: Technology, Society and Business | Recorded lectures (mp3) from a course at Berkeley University. From MS Research (Dr Jaimee Teevan) - ¨40% of the finding that people do is actually re-finding. Most people don’t bookmark or otherwise save found items because they expect to be able to find them again. But they also expect to re-find an item at the same position in the search results list, and they’re significantly disrupted if it has moved.¨ Found via Jon Udell - Is software too soft? (blog post, Nov 07) |
| Search at the Foundation of the Enterprise | Blog post reviewing different indexing and ranking methods, including Bayesian Inference, Vector Space and Probabilistic - Latent Semantic Analysis (Aug 07) |
| User behaviour research | Article describing user behaviour analysis techniques MS Research is using to improve search results (August 06) |
| Search objective gets a refined approach | Microsoft Research paper describing a new ranking algorithm - object-level vertical search. Vertical = a specific domain (e.g. academic, product), object = a specific item embedded in a web page (e.g. person, paper, event). Theory being that people are usually more interested in objects rather than the whole web page (June 06) |