“Beyond Search – Semantic Computing and Internet Economics”
From the intro:

Has it become any easier to find a needle in a haystack or just buy a new needle in the information age?

The surface Web consists of tens of billions of pages in over 80 languages and is growing rapidly. Beneath this surface Web, lies a deep Web of much greater size. Tens of thousands of merchants offer millions of products. Complexity, size, and rate of expansion combine to make finding information and products on the Web a significant challenge. The ‘user,’ now participates as an ‘innovator’ and ‘contributor,’ adding to the size and content, but not necessarily the structure, of the Web.

Today, we are still in the early stages of the digital information age, with few opportunities to greatly improve the ways in which the information seeker finds information.

This Request for Proposals is done in partnership with Microsoft adCenter in support of its collaboration with the academic research community.

Submission deadline
The RFP due date is November 1, 2007, 5pm PDT (-8 UTC/GMT)

Awards
The total amount available under this request for proposals (RFP) is $1,000,000. Microsoft anticipates making approximately 20 awards averaging $50,000, with a maximum of $100,000 for any single award.

RFP highlights:

To advance academic research and publication in the area of Internet Research and, in particular in data mining, information finding, information supply, and internet economics, Microsoft intends to make available to the RFP awardees a Microsoft adCenter Search query log excerpt with 100 million search queries along with ad click logs sampled over a few months, and a Live Search query log excerpt with 15 million search queries with per-query search result click-throughs. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will provide advertiser accounts to all winners.

This RFP has two tracks:
+ Track 1 – Semantic Computing

+ Track 2 – Internet Economics
Microsoft encourages proposals for either track which describe innovative research using the adCenter, Live Search, and SDK assets in bold, novel, and unconventional approaches to further Internet Research and related technologies, including interdisciplinary research.

Again, much more info and in greater detail in the RFP document.

A Microsoft Word Version of the Complete Document is Also Available

Source: Microsoft Research

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 and is filed under Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science, Search News, Technology and Internet, Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.