More on Personalization

This time in the media.

Here is an excerpt from an informative article Gates vs. Google (which was finally made publicly available w/o subscription)

Another advantage for Gates & Co. is that search engines are still technologically primitive. They can't understand context, for example; if you type "chip," they can't tell whether you are looking for a snack food or high-tech equipment. As a result all three big search engines are scrambling to find ways to make search more personalized. The thinking is that the more a search engine knows about who is searching, the more accurate the results will be.

I wonder how far Yahoo and Google are in terms of processing and extracting useful data from this personalized information at the moment and is Microsoft keeping the pace? Thus far I haven't seen anything to suggest that MS is able to do this at the moment.

Each company has the foundations of such a product in its desktop-search software, which can tell what you have on your hard drive. Perhaps Microsoft, because it understands Windows better than any other company, will be able to offer faster, more accurate searches.

The problem is that the issue is not about the speed of the Desktop search, the issue is which company will be able to extract, process and use peronsonalized information better. The speed problem pales in comparison with the later problem.

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Personalization Gates Technology Google