Whilst we traditionally associate Google with the world of academia, having been started by two Stanford students trying to find a way to index academic papers, we have recently witnessed MSN following foot by tapping into the university research market with the announcement of their "Accelerating Search in Academic Research" awards.
Twelve winners from 36 were chosen on the merit of their proposals to receive funding directly from Bill Gate's MSN for research advancing the field of search. Although the funding will come in very handy for these lucky winners, it's the access to MSN's search logs which is probably the more juicy prise for their success.
Interestingly, Microsoft were keen to scrub any personal details from the logs they made available, and were very keen to point out that query terms were filtered to remove any possible mention of credit card numbers, phone numbers, or social security numbers.
With a potential award of between $30 and 50,000, the competition level was fierce and checking out the winners' ideas quickly reveals that the standards are incredibly high. One such proposition, 'Vinegar', has the goal of:
"Analyzing search logs in conjunction with other temporal information (such as news events or blog posts), [with the hope of understanding] how query behaviour is impacted by external events and, conversely, how aggregate search behaviour can be predictive of events and trends in other domains."
Which sounds remarkably in line with Larry Page's desire, as expressed last week, of producing a search engine capable of pre-empting the query term required for a search engine user.
Microsoft have offered the chance to impress with the Accelerating Search in Academic Research awards and have been paid back with some outstanding concepts. Here's hoping that next year's batch are equally impressive.
If you liked this, then further reading can be found on Microsoft's External research and Programs pages.
