People Cube (Renlifang)

Microsoft Research Asia made debut a new object-level verticle search engine last week.  Renlifang (or People Cube), the newcomer of internet searching applications starts with the name of a person, a geographic address, or an organization and through calculating records on more than 1 billion Chinese webpages, it draws a networked map of the searched, showing the most closely related content.

The technical base of the engine is called object-level vertical search. Unlike most other engines, which rely exclusively on the relevance of words, the latest one focuses on the relevance of relationship between the targeted people and those around him. While it is easy for some websites to cheat on click rate, which is crucial for pageranking, Relifang takes into the time the users browsing webpages into ranking account and therefore increase the credit of ranking.

The searching service is free of charge but in Chinese only. It runs a special section for the upcoming Olympics too. By typing in the names of athletes, users can get maps demonstrating who are most related to their interested ones. Microsoft indicates that the server tracks users’ searching records in case any lawsuit.

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