Microsoft U Rank: Personalize Your Search Results
Microsoft Research just announced the release of a new experimental search engine interface with a focus on personalization and social networking. U Rank allows you to reorder your searches, add notes, create lists of results, and share your personalized search results with your friends. The search results look like they are drawn directly from from Microsoft Live Search. Microsoft has created a short screencast that demonstrates U Rank's functionality in detail.
Definitely Not Google+Digg
The main feature of this new search interface - the ability to reorder search results at will - is decisively different from the rumors about a digg-style Google interface that tend to reappear regularly. In U Rank, your changes only appear to your friends and don't influence the overall search index.
The emphasis of U Rank is on collaboration and sharing. U Rank keeps a history of all your searches, but these are not shared by default. U Rank also allows you to create lists of search results by allowing you to copy a given search result to another search. You could, for example, create a list of personalized search results for a search term like "Best Digital Camera."
Definitely Still a Prototype
U Rank is clearly still a prototype. Search results take a long time to load, and some very basic user interface issues clearly still need to be worked out. There is, for example, no way to move a search result from the second search page to the first, and the interface for dragging and dropping items sometimes doesn't work well. To be really useful, it would also be helpful if you could organize your friends into groups, so that you can share your searches on lists more selectively.
However, this is also a very interesting experiment that takes search into a different direction by putting a lot of emphasis on social interaction. If your searches tend to be very broad, you would probably have to have a lot of friends to ever encounter an annotated or reordered result, but we can see how this new interface could be very useful if you are working in a team that is focused on a very specific topic.
Comments
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They appear to be channeling Mahalo on the logo/color scheme and to a lesser degree, the concept.
Posted by: Derek | October 20, 2008 2:58 PM
I definitely like the idea of creating your own lists of search results that can then, in turn, be searched. The idea is very user centered, and allows the user to define relevance directly in their own context.
Posted by: Micah | October 20, 2008 7:51 PM
Is this the same as last week's story? Has something been updated?
Posted by: Mango | October 21, 2008 12:08 AM
The Empire (MSFT) strikes back.
MSFT can make solutions and services mainstream as they are a household brand name world wide.
Posted by: Engago Team | October 21, 2008 4:45 AM
The logo somewhat resembles Mahalo and the functionality of reordering and annotating results is similar to Wikia search.
Posted by: Wolf | October 21, 2008 6:16 AM
Good googly moogly! They read my posts! :) Great outline of an interesting aspect Frederic.
The race should be on any time for the next generation of relevance powered by ....uh...us.
Always,
Phil
Posted by: Phil Butler | October 21, 2008 8:37 AM
This is so like Wikia. Wow MS is so innovative.
Posted by: anonymous | October 22, 2008 1:42 AM
If they're ever going to gain ground on Google, MSFT needs to spend time developing innovative solutions that have mass appeal, not niche plays that will never gain the critical mass they'd need to survive.
Posted by: Buck | October 22, 2008 10:45 AM
It's an interesting merger of search and social networking. I am rather excited to try it out. There is a site that lets you search trends (ours, www.trendpedia.com) and email/facebook the search. I think this appears to be similar but with more of an emphasis on list sharing (like digg?). I'm siging up to see.
Posted by: Linda Margaret | October 23, 2008 2:40 AM