This is pretty interesting news and one that shows how MSN is looking to automate some of the editoral process to fine tune its search results. They have introduced us to something called Neural Net Technology, which as Danny points out appears to be some enhanced way to recognize the good from the bad. He allows points to a MSN research paper that Gary found about neural net technology, except it calls it RankNet. MSN has released details of this new technology here which goes on to talk about how the team has obsessively focused on the relevance of the web results. It really doesn't go into much about the new technology just that it gives the example of the search "pbs evolution videos" as an example of improving results by raising the main PBS website to the top for the particular phrase. It would make sense for this site to be at the top, and MSN is trying to get it there. They provide the example of a nifty color indicator (below) to show how the term "pbs evolution videos" has risen to the top. The green is the actual PBS site rising int he ranks finally to number one. What the yellow is appears to be either another relevant page fromt he same site, or other closely match relevant sites to the search query.
MSN Adds New Commands
inanchor: - this will make some people what a cool command that lets you search all the text in anchors. However as Danny reports here, its NOT working right now.
filetype: - search by filetype, pretty simple
inurl: - find pages that have text within the url, nifty feature
intitle: - search the title of sites only
linkdomain: - a favorite of SEO's, the linkdomain: replaces link: and does a pretty good job of finding all incoming links to the site.
contains: - this one is a tad interesting, it lets you find pages with links to documents of a particular filetype.
The SEW Forums are a buzz this morning with results for this new technology and what people are seeing happen. I have been studying it closely myself and there are some distinctions. One of the member originally noticed heavy changes back at the start of the month, and in which other follow up to report some different changes as well in the rankings of their pages. Sudden spikes in traffic seem characteristic lately of the new changes being put in place. My observations are in line with the first poster on the thread where the spike was seen in the beginning of the month. Marcia and a few others are seeing good spikes right now.
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