David Flynn09 March 2007, 6:36 AM
Microsoft's Research Team has demonstrated to journalists an intriguing new web feature that could become part of Internet Explorer 8.
APC's David Flynn is reporting daily from Seattle on Microsoft TechFest -- the software giant's 'open day' for the world media to see the latest developments from its research lab.
Today I saw what could be on of the first features of Internet Explorer 8 to emerge.
It's one of dozens of fascinating research projects Microsoft is working on.
However, for every dozen unpolished concepts on show at this week's TechFest, there's at least one application which is much closer on the horizon.
That looks to be the case for Web Assistant, a browser enhancement which applies a sense of context to content in order to make searching for related information faster and more accurate.
With work already underway on Internet Explorer 8, which is slated for release in late 2008 or early 2009, Web Assistant certainly looks a starter. It struck us as a relatively mature offering with a natural place in Microsoft's existing product line-up.
What is web assistant?
To start with, it's not a dog with a wagging tail, or an annoying paper clip pointing out that it looks like you're searching the web. Would you like some help?
No, Microsoft ha finally learned from those mistakes.
In its simplest form, the Web Assistant processes the page you're currently viewing and recognises key words and phrases in the story.
A window pane to the right of the main screen aggregates the most common types of online searches, listing each under a tab -- such as On The Web for a conventional search, In The News for news stories, Images, and Reference (which currently points to Wikipedia).
Clicking any of the highlighted words in the main article automatically fetches up relevant links under each of those tabs, to save you from manually visiting a search engine and entering the text.
Users can also create specialised sets of 'Web Assistant bookmarks' to aggregate any links related to a particular story.
That much of Web Assistant looks pretty well baked.
More impressive, although still a little rough around the edges, is how the program can use context to ‘disambiguate' searches where a word may have several likely meanings and recognise the particular meaning that you're looking for.
For example, browsing a Web page on African wildlife that mentions the jaguar would ensure that the links called forth in the Web Assistant tabs would be search links, images and the Wikipedia entry for the large jungle cat rather than the car or the Apple operating system.
This obviously calls for a lot of computing smarts taking place behind the scene, and would be assisted if users allowed the PC to anonymously share their usage patterns and results with others to expand the program's base of contextual knowledge.
David Flynn is attending TechFest at Seattle as a guest of Microsoft