I'm excited about the work coming from External Research & Programs: Microsoft Live Labs: Accelerating Search in Academic Research 2006 RFP Awards.

One of the projects, from Suresh Bhanani and Lada Adamic at UMich, is going to take on deep clickstream analysis in a fixed content domain.  In their words: "We will extract the most common health-related queries and use both human experts and natural language processing to identify key facts located on the Web pages returned by the search engine. We will then correlate the search engine ranking with the completeness of information on the page."

They offer the following sample visualization of how a search engine might distribute users through a set of linked content across related domains.


I'll visit some of the other Live Labs grant projects in the future.