http://news.com.com/Microsoft+looks+for+better+way+to+search+the+Net/2100-1038_3-6165026.html

Going along with what we have been learning about search, this article discusses some of the future fixes that Microsoft has planned in their hopes to overtake Google. Microsoft plans to look at how people refine unsuccessful searches, that is searches that did not retrieve the wanted results, in order to better provide results. This method sounds very intuitive. The Personalized Search, based on what users have on their hard drive looks like a bigger leap, allowing for better matches based on individual information.

Both of these steps sound like natural improvements to the indexing heuristics that were discussed in lecture, since the first does the equivalent of learning from mistakes and is similar to fuzzy logic results. However, this would require a lot more data to be gathered in order to work successfully. Also, it may not take into account the authority aspect that some sites have, as it is likely to help lesser known sites that get overshadowed by those that are returned in rather broad search results. The second one of course sounds very easy to imagine thinking up, but it seems likely people could have misgivings about the way that it uses personal content to search. One method I think might be useful is to find a way to use personal information to create some sort of search analogue to the Music Genome Project, taking into account a variety of tastes and preferences.