MSFT is claiming to be the first to focus on weblog search. I am sure the folks at Technorati , Feedster, Daypop, et al are curious to see what exactly they are talking about.
MSFT, clearing puffing out its chest, also claims it will roll out its version of news (already in beta) and, at some point this decade, a natural language query engine. Uh huh.
Thanks, Gary.
The press report says that MS is claiming to be the first. I wasn’t there, but I also don’t see any press releases from MS with that claim. I think it’s equally likely that the reporter was unfamiliar with the space and got it wrong. People at MS are definitely familiar with Technorati Feedster, etc.
Microsoft Research demonstrated a question-answering system called AskMSR a couple of years ago. It uses both formal natural language technology and statistical analysis to analyze questions and find approrpiate answers. A paper describing the system is at http://research.microsoft.com/~sdumais/EMNLP_Final.pdf and I know that they have continued to improve it.
Kevin
Thanks Kevin!
This paper (also by MS Researchers) might be of interest.
Web Question Answering: Is More Always Better?
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jimmylin/papers/Dumais02.pdf
gary