Emporia – Microsoft’s Personalized Search Engine

Microsoft is now all set to make the rapidly increasing online information more user-friendly and accessible with a new personalized search engine – Emporia.

A team of five scientists have been working in Cambridge to develop a search engine that is intelligent enough to learn and provide search results based on individual needs.

Ralf Herbrich, a Microsoft manager, recently announced the developments at the Next11 conference in Berlin, he even brought along a prototype to demonstrate.

Microsoft hopes to make the rapidly growing flood of information online more user-friendly and accessible with its new personalised search engine, Emporia.

To tell whether an item is relevant for a user, the Emporia project also analyses data from posts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Knowledge and concrete experience from these networks is growing ever more important, says Herbrich.

The first prototype of Project Emporia is ready for mobile use on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and is already one of the top 10 apps on Microsoft’s Marketplace.

Emporia provides results by analyzing news streams, searching for keywords and key categories and filtering for interesting stories. Users can refine the results by following certain people of websites.

Personalized appraisals are expected to result in data that is more relevant to an individual’s personal interests.