Microsoft Research - Search Result Clustering (SRC)

Last week I installed the Search Results Clustering toolbar from  sandbox.msn.com and I'm lovin' it! Imagine you do a search, and in addition to the normal results you'd expect, you end up getting a bunch of grouped results on the left. I've found it adds a new dimension to my search results. Where I might normally go straight to altering my search parameters, now I find I can glance at the groupings on the left and quite often drill into an interesting grouping of results that I normally would've never seen (or even thought of). Try it out here.

Here's the official description I pulled off sandbox.msn.com

MSRA SRC is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, that was developed at Web Search and Mining Group in MSR, Asia. On-the-fly it clusters a search engine's search results into different groups, and provides meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate the user's browsing.

Traditional clustering techniques don't work for this problem because the documents are short, the cluster names should be readable and the algorithm should be efficient for on-the-fly calculation. The method takes on the whole problem in a different way and overcomes the difficulties in traditional clustering methods. It tries to first identify salient topics by identifying distinct and independent keywords, and then classifies the search results into these topics. Check out the associated research paper and their toolbar .