Bio-degradable
Google may have realtime, voice and sight search, but Microsoft believes it has an interesting value proposition too; a biographical search engine which allows users to delve more deeply into people, products and businesses.
The project, called EntityCube, has been adapted from a Chinese research prototype by the name of "Renlifang," developed in Microsoft's Asian research labs.
The Chinese version has already been a big hit behind the bamboo curtain, as people flock to find linked and relevant information about prominent persons and firms, all handily compiled in one neat page including charts mapping relationships and associates. Yes, we went straight to the Tiger Woods page.
Microsoft says the site "employs automatic algorithms to extract entity information," as well as plot relationship charts, so "users can submit a query about any person, location, and organization and then explore their relationships."
In short, EntityCube not only searches, but also manages to do a fairly decent job at summarising the information it finds from "billions of crawled Web pages."
In addition to a biography page and social network graph for the individual or entity in question, EntityCube also visually plots the "shortest relationship path between two individuals, and all titles of a person found on the Web."
Of course, at the moment it's only a science project and users who like to search for themselves may be a tad disappointed if they're not as notorious as Amanda Knox or as rich as Rupert Murdoch, but it's a start, and an interesting counter to Google's Hot Trends.
