Microsoft Patent Hints At Search Results Tailored To User's Mood, Intelligence 146
theodp writes "A newly surfaced Microsoft patent application, reports GeekWire, describes a 'user-following engine' that analyzes your posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to deduce your mood, interests, and even your smarts. The system would then automatically adjust the search experience and results to better match those characteristics, explains Microsoft, such as changing the background color of the search interface to suit your mood, or bringing back only those search results that won't strain your feeble brain. From the patent application: 'In addition to skewing the search results to the user's inferred interests, the user-following engine may further tailor the search results to a user's comprehension level. For example, an intelligent processing module may be directed to discerning the sophistication and education level of the posts of a user. Based on that inference, the customization engine may vary the sophistication level of the customized search result.'"
Number one reason I dislike Microsoft... (Score:4, Interesting)
Google already doing this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Number one reason I dislike Microsoft... (Score:5, Interesting)
The funniest part about this is where they deduce your intelligence. Really microsoft, the finest minds on earth have yet to come up with a satisfactory definition of the term, yet your goons are going to magicalgorithm the concept into your search results?
Re:But isn't this Microsoft all over? (Score:4, Interesting)
They buy into the iTruck hype and keep assuming that the damn thing will keep driving itself down the I-95 while they have a quick kip behind the wheel. And then blame us when they end up in a ditch.
Hence, me bringing up the point of the meanings being conflated. It, contrary to popular (indeed, encouraged) belief, doesn't just work. Hence, the diesel mechanics tend to think less of the truck drivers who haven't bothered to ever look under their hoods; and berate us for making the mere suggestion that they might consider doing so.
Re:But isn't this Microsoft all over? (Score:4, Interesting)
Get real, in this case the headline should read M$ patents delusion. Have you ever heard of speech recognition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition [wikipedia.org], after all these years and all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it it still sucks. To get anywhere near accurate you have to train the person and software, the person has to remain sober and always speak in the manner they have been trained by the software to maintain. Open speech recognition is still many years off.
This patent claim is about taking what you've typed in and based upon passed wildly intrusive privacy invasion, guess what your actually searching for.
I have helped people search, in fact doing it for them and they often struggle to provide a clear verbal description of what they are really after, even after personally knowing them and listening to them for a few minutes. Only once the search is being done and results come up can you compare the results to what they are telling you to finally really understand what they are after.
M$ is simply filing a patent on something they are incapable of doing just in case someone can do it. A quick review of the patent indicates that it wildly infringes upon privacy laws. Reading it seems, this patent seems to be more about throwing out a patent net for each of the described functions rather than the whole patent. A whole bunch of submarine patents.