Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Microsoft Research Beyond Search grants

Microsoft Research is offering $1M in research grants for "research in the area of Semantic Computing, Internet Economics and Online Advertising".

A juicy dataset is provided for that research, 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 clickthroughs."

Sadly, the grants and access to the data are open only to academic research groups. I suppose that is to be expected after the ruckus that followed the now-defunct AOL Research group's naive attempt to offer their search logs more widely. I guess non-academics will just have to buy search logs from ISPs.

By the way, I thought it was amusing, when looking over the terms of Microsoft's request for proposals, to see that participants are discouraged from "relying exclusively on non-Microsoft technologies." Ah, yes, what good is research if it doesn't use Microsoft products?

[Found via ResourceShelf]

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