Microsoft prototype search engine personalizes results

Microsoft's research arm has developed a prototype search engine with social-networking features that let users edit and reorder search results, as well as share them with online friends.

The prototype engine marks Microsoft's latest effort to bolster its search business to better compete against market leader Google, which captured 63 percent of the search market in August, according to ComScore. Microsoft held about 8 percent of the search market at the time, according to the market researcher.

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Earlier this month, Microsoft unveiled a rewards program aimed at boosting traffic to its Live Search site. And industry observers have noted that Microsoft's so-far failed effort to acquire Yahoo likely was piqued by Yahoo's search assets.

Microsoft Research said that the prototype search engine, called U Rank, will help it learn more about how people use search technologies. The prototype was unveiled earlier this month.

"U Rank is a research project to help us learn more about how people organize search results as they go about larger information tasks, how people collaboratively search, and generally, how people edit and share searches," the company said in a blog post. "We believe that finding something on the Web is only the first step for many tasks. To better support people as they are exploring a topic, U Rank has general support for organizing, annotating, remembering, and sharing search results."

U Rank lets users reorder and edit search results and move search results between searches, Microsoft said. Changes made to a user's own search results, such as moves, deletions, and the addition of new results and notes, can be made visible to friends.

Microsoft said that it envisions users tapping U Rank for various search scenarios, such as:

Organizing and annotating results by summarizing key information under each URL;
Keeping lists while researching;
Collaborating by sharing URLs with friends;
Making recommendations to friends by sharing preferred sites;
Mixing video and images with Web results; and
Moving favorite sites to higher search result slots.