• Small Business SEM, Monday, December 10, 2007 1:15 PM

Matt McGee has screenshots of blended search in action with Microsoft's Live Search. Using searches for "furniture," "PlayStation 3" and "Ron Paul," he illustrates how each set of results contained a mix of local, video, news and shopping results, as appropriate.

Microsoft enlists user feedback to help improve the overall relevance and functionality of its blended search -- asking "Is this useful?" next to the headline of each subset of results, and giving users the option to click yes or no.

As an example of how Microsoft is working out the kinks, McGee notes that when a previous search for "Italian restaurants" yielded news results, he let Live Search know that the info wasn't useful -- and now the same search returns local search listings, "Just as you'd expect."

But that case illustrates just how difficult it is to get relevance right for each user, as someone might have actually been in search of news results about "Italian restaurants" in general, as opposed to local business details.

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