p2pnet - rss feed: Out-Googling Google
There’s a good chance that soon, the Google newsbot will have an MSN bot breathing down its neck.
And why not? In its bid to rule the world, Microsoft tries to either buy up or steamroll just about anything that’s working successfully.
"A news-gathering web site that tailors the stories selected to individual users is being tested by Microsoft," says a New Scientist report here.
Once the MSN Newsbot is fully functional, "Microsoft says the site will personalise results within 10 minutes of a user starting to browse," says the story.
"If successful, the site is likely to be a direct rival to the highly popular Google News, which clusters information from over 4000 news sources according to topics but does not customise results. ‘Taking a step towards further customisation, beyond what Google has done, is a good thing,’ says Raul Valdes-Perez, president of Vivisimo, a software company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that specialises in clustering technologies.
"He says that the engineering of search and rank algorithms ‘has gone about as far as it can go’. Now the way to improve the user experience is to work on the next layer of algorithms that determine the presentation of the ’search and rank’ results.
